2024 spring program

EMPAC is pleased to announce its spring program. From January through May 2024, EMPAC–the Curtis R. Priem Center for Experimental Media and Performing Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York presents a robust slate of curatorial programming.

Concerts, film, dance, talks, and a two-day transducer symposium gather artists, scholars, and audiences at the forefront of international discourse around time-based arts and technology. 

Barobar Jagtana is a screening of Suneil Sanzgiri’s vivid trilogy of short films, presented in New York State’s Capital Region for the first time (January 11). 

Poetry & Fairy Tale is a recital by pianist and composer Conrad Tao, hailed “the kind of musician who is shaping the future of classical music” (New York Magazine), playing a program of Brahms, Moellenberg, Fulmer, Saunders, and Ravel (January 19).

µ (mu) is composer and artist Marina Rosenfeld’s newest project that takes her decades-long work with dubplates into new visual and sonic territory, and the artist shares its beginnings with audiences during this talk (January 24).

Reembodied Sound 2024 is a two-day festival and symposium on transducer-based music and sonic art, co-presented with the Rensselaer Department of Arts, that includes a remounting of David Tudor’s Rainforest IV with John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein; a keynote address by sound art scholar and composer Cathy van Eck; a concert of transducer-based works; and sound installations throughout the center (February 2-3).

Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in with filmmaker Shen Xin, performer Ali Van, and the debut of their collaborative project AX Archive, includes a North American film premiere and a live improvisation with spatialized audio (February 9).

A Plot / A Scandal is a two-night presentation with award-winning dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis as "master of ceremonies" (2023 Der Faust Prize) taking up “plot” in its multiple meanings (February 16 & 17).

AKOMA previews a new concert from electronic musician Jlin and visual artist Florence To, who are developing an interactive landscape in sound and light while in residence at the center (March 15).

Theo Jean Cuthand gives an artist talk, screening, and workshop exploring his rangy and irreverent moving image works through an Indigiqueer lens during a two-day co-presentation with iEAR Presents (March 26 & 27).

Susceptible Chambers is a world premiere by composer-performers Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino that begins with the re-construction of a simple microphone and expands into technologies from bygone eras—pulley systems, pianolas, needlepoint, sodium vapor lamps—to draw audiences into an idiosyncratic and playful sonic and visual world (April 5). The premiere is preceded by an open studio at the start of the season (January 17).

Space Carcasses by choreographer Onye Ozuzu explores architectures that haunt the body and impart their histories to us as physical effects. This in-progress showing debuts the work’s “sound dancer” element, engineered with the center’s spatialization sound technology while the artist is in residence (April 23).

Machines and other intergalactic technologies of the spirit previews a new music production of psychedelic rock, noise music, opera, and doom metal by Afro-gothic composer and vocalist M. Lamar in collaboration with experimental music duo The Living Earth Show (May 3).

Additionally, EMPAC is pleased to present a curated set of lectures, with appearances from visiting scholars:

André Lepecki on choreographic works that challenge the ideas of time as a technology for policing movement (January 25); Marina Vishmidt on art, labor, and value, reflecting on projects from EMPAC’s archive (February 22); Ezekiel Dixon-Román on computation influenced by black radical anti-colonial thought, cybernetics, and critical philosophies of technology (March 21); and Peli Grietzer on art’s structures in relation to architectures of artificial intelligence (April 11).

Curators: Katherine C.M. Adams, Assistant Curator / Vic Brooks, Associate Director, Arts and Senior Curator, Time-Based Visual Art / Amadeus Julian Regucera, Music.