More than a performing arts center, EMPAC is a busy project incubator for artworks traveling far beyond the Rensselaer campus; through the commissioning of new projects that go on to travel the international festival circuit, the center has become a major force in the world of experimental media.
As a result of President Trump’s executive order preventing travel to the US from a number of countries, we will not be able to obtain the necessary artist visas for either event.
The commissioning of new artworks has been central to the EMPAC program since even before the center opened in 2008.
JAN 27–28, 2017 — Tesseract
Composer, musician, and Deep Listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros shared a very close collaborative relationship with EMPAC from the time she joined Rensselaer until she died at the age of 84 on November 24, 2016.
In 2012, avant-garde jazz saxophonist John Zorn performed a rare solo set in EMPAC's Studio 2. Zorn's label Tzadik Records has now released an album-length recording of the show, titled The Classic Guide to Strategy Vol. 4. This is the fourth and penultimate installation in a series of solo records that Zorn began in 1983. Filled with wit, drama, playfulness and intensity, the composer's legendary virtuosity and powerful improvisational logic is on full display.
In March of 2015, Italian artist Rosa Barba presented The Color Out of Space, a meditative science-fiction film, crafted from images taken through the telescope at Rensselaer's Hirsch Observatory, and projected on the facade of the EMPAC building.
This fall, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center is launching the EMPAC+ (EMPAC Plus) student program. Part of the campuswide Art_X initiative to integrate the methods and mindset of art-making across the Institute curriculum, the program offers free admission to all EMPAC-curated events as well as a multi-tiered rewards system encouraging students to more deeply explore the experimental arts at Rensselaer.
Developed and premiered at EMPAC in 2014, Isabelle Pauwels' ,000, has been adapted as a radio play and is available to stream on the Or Gallery website. Originally conceived and presented as an immersive installation with 27 channels of audio, 9 channels of video, sculptural elements and choreographed lighting, ,000, has also been adapted into a single-channel video that was recently screened as part of the DIM Cinema series at the Cinematheque.
The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is pleased to announce the hiring of Ashley Ferro-Murray to the position of Curator of Theater and Dance. With a background in choreography and critical theory, Ferro-Murray comes to EMPAC following the recent completion of a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley with a focus on New Media.