21 Sep 2009

Slow Wave: Seeing Sleep at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, NY

EMPAC HOSTS SLOW WAVE, A THREE-DAY FESTIVAL ON THE ART AND SCIENCE OF SLEEP

Troy, NY – On Friday September 25 through Sunday September 27, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center will present Slow Wave: Seeing Sleep, a festival of installations, films, music, and scientific exhibit devoted to the enduring enigma of sleep. Over three days, visitors will have a chance to view installations by Jennifer Hall, Allan Hobson, Pierre Huyghe, Rodney Graham, Fernando Orellana & Brendan Burns, Ana Rewakowicz and Andy Warhol; attend a performance of Alvin Lucier’s Music for a Solo Performer, and revisit milestones in science’s ongoing attempt to lift the curtain of the sleeping mind. Slow Wave will examine the particular techniques through which sleep is understood, and will serve as a meeting ground for empirical and poetic modes of knowledge, where recordings of brain waves function as drawings and works of art double as experiments.

Curated by Emily Zimmerman.

Additional event information can be found on the EMPAC website:
www.empac.rpi.edu


SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Friday September 25, 2009

5 – 7 pm: Opening for the exhibition

Saturday, September 26 2009

6 pm - midnight: Lullabies from all around all around you
Concert Hall
Sit in the concert hall and listen to lullabies from all over the world played simultaneously from many directions.    

6:30 pm: Portraying the Body in Sleep
Mezzanine
A workshop on reading polysomnograms, the primary means used by sleep labs to depict the changes that take place in the body during sleep.   

8 pm + 9 pm: Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer
Concert Hall
Lucier’s piece uses the brain waves of a seated, still performer to create spatial percussion music of resonances, rattles, and crashes. A rarely produced, radical composition from the 1960s with special guest performers from the Rensselaer community.   

10 pm: Waking Life (Directed by Richard Linklater, 2001)
Theater
Taking its title from George Santayana’s statement that, “Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled,” Waking Life follows a young man through a series of philosophical conversations that take place while he is caught in a lucid dream.

10:30 pm: Sleepover under Warhol’s Sleep (1963)
Studio 2
Bring a sleeping bag and pillow and sleepover in Studio 2 under a projection of Warhol’s marathon five-and-a-half hour film, Sleep. Prior to the sleepover, a selection of teas for sleeping will be served. Space is limited; please reserve your ticket in advance.    

Sunday, September 27, 2009

9 am: Coffee and tour of the exhibition, followed by brunch and discussion (for participants of the sleepover)   
Evelyn’s Cafe


About EMPAC
The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) opened its doors in 2008 and was hailed by the New York Times as a “technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses… dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before.”

Founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC offers artists, scholars, researchers, engineers, designers, and audiences opportunities for creative exploration that are available nowhere else under a single roof. EMPAC operates nationally and internationally, attracting creative individuals from around the world and sending new artworks and innovative ideas onto the global stage.

EMPAC’s building is a showcase work of architecture and a unique technological facility that boasts unrivaled presentation and production capabilities for art and science spanning the physical and virtual worlds and the spaces in between.