With over 15 premieres spanning theater, 24-channel sound, contemporary dance, video, and a barn-raising; exchanges with artists, curators, and creative engineers; and a dynamic archive of the artistic process, this three day festival highlights EMPAC’s focus on creation via commissions and residencies.

Performances and installations include:

MTAA (NYC)
Hans Tutschku (Cambridge, MA)
BalletLab (Australia)
Yanira Castro (NYC)
Early Morning Opera (Los Angeles)
Volkmar Klien (Austria)
DANCE MOViES Commission 2009-2010 Premieres
Michael Schumacher (NYC)

Filament also unveils Live Shorts: three programs of performances from across the spectrum of dance, theater, music, and the visual arts, commissioned specifically for this festival. Working within the same constraints, artists will present varied and vigorous short works.

Live Shorts artists include:

* Wally Cardona • SUE-C & Laetitia Sonami • Steve Cuiffo, Trey Lyford, & Geoff Sobelle • Jen DeNike • MTAA • Miro Dance Theater • National Theater of the United States of America • Trouble

Curators: Kathleen Forde, Helene Lesterlin, Micah Silver, Emily Zimmerman

Chirality is a scientific term describing a structure that is not identical to its mirror image. “Chiral” collects cinematic etudes, which develop various conceptual approaches in order to expand the two-dimensional image into space. They are projected onto a sculpture (510 x 260 x 370 cm) and a screen (250 x 200 cm) made from handmade Taiwanese paper and develop very different lives on these configurations of the same material.

The amalgamation of volumetric lights sets ideas from Chinese calligraphy into motion and melts them with influences from European Art Informel as well as impasto painting to an abstract-organic sculpture. The installation is completed by a soundtrack by Austrian composer Richard Eigner (www.ritornell.at). With the premiere in MOCA Taipei the first iteration of the long-term project was presented…

Premiered at Tripolar Exhibition – 3 Positions of German Video Art
Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei, Taiwan)
Date June 15th 2010 – July 18th 2010

Supported by Council of Culture Affairs Taiwan, Taipei Culture Foundation, Goethe-Institute Taipei, Eden Book Store
Sponsored by Optoma, Transcend, Asus

music: Ellen Allien & Apparat – Edison

In search of ways out of this mess we’ve gotten into, the 2010 Festival for Art, Technology and Society turns to the pioneers of our age. Not the adventurers who’ve sailed forth because they wanted to find out what awaits them on the other side, but rather the visionaries who are bringing expertise as well as a great deal of creativity and idealism to bear in their work on an alternative future. repair is the title of a festival designed to pursue the paths opened up by these trailblazers and to show why it’s imperative for us to follow their lead …

The Transcendent City is an autonomous artificial machine that extends across the earth adapting to the natural eco-systems it encounters while deriving its energy from the renewable resources available at each particular site. The systems desire is to maintain homeostasis within itself whilst maintaining homeostasis within the greater system, Gaia. Its processes are engineered on the molecular scale by nano technologies controlled by molecular computers that monitor and analyse the environment.

A little character in a cone-shaped hat has been the focus, muse and hero for Wu Junyong’s creative practice for the past five years. This character has made his appearance in paintings, watercolors, prints, paper cuts, video animation and, more recently, in laser cut brass. With his mischievous smile and caustic gaze on society, the figure could well be Wu himself (they do look conspicuously alike), crossing the oceans and swimming through the centuries that make up the unique and ludicrous carnival that is the landscape of Wu Junyong’s work.

Wu’s protagonist first appeared in 2003, and began wearing his distinctive hat in 2005 as a symbol of power. Just as the king wears a crown, his headdress represents the pyramidal shape of a society that mirrors his own. With a decidedly black humour, we are shown the absurdity of this society’s order, the brutish behaviour of many of its participants and the role that each of us also plays in its construction.

The son of a wood engraver in Fujian province, Wu Junyong always loved to draw, and even in the years before art school had begun to record what he saw as the idiocies of the world around him. This need for critical expression in Wu led to the development of his own visual dialect – a patois of mockery, myths and iconography inspired by classical humanists like da Vinci and Dürer, and their secular explorations of the human being.

Wu’s work over the last five years has seen an evolution from the personal and physiological to more public, sociological issues. The quasi-hysterical Wait Us Rich (2005) expresses an obsession with the body, with a rash, and almost gross, visual vocabulary; the Opera Series work, Parade (2006), is preoccupied with sexuality and its fantasies; while in the more recent Flowers of Chaos (2010) personal concerns have been overtaken by questions relating to history and society’s manipulation of human beings.

Wu Junyong has said the use of new media allows him to fulfil many dreams and expectations on a relatively low budget, the ink and the computer side by side on his desk.

Wu’s art practice has developed over a twelve-year period in the relatively peaceful and moderately sized Hangzhou; however he recently moved to experience the challenges and stimulations of the large city of Beijing. Using the computer terminology of his generation, Wu describes this move as hitting the ‘refresh’ button on his practice.

Marie Terrieux, 2010

It seemed to me a cloud encompassed us,

Luminous, dense, consolidate and bright

As adamant on which the sun is striking.

Into itself did the eternal pearl

Receive us, even as water doth receive

A ray of light, remaining still unbroken.

I’ve been working a little more on a mesh class and added face extrusions with history. As a little test I tried to emulate a procedural Houdini video by Manuel Tausch (vimeo.com/8309528).