Fiat Lux brings to light the ecological relationships of interbeing that connect human and nonhuman worlds. Here, as expressed in collaborative performance with Alma Peguero, a Dominican artist and spiritual teacher residing in Santo Domingo who uses drawing and performance to study principles of universal order. This event highlights ongoing research and experimentation in light and landscapes engaging plant-human dynamics, conducted outdoors across Upstate NY, and on RPI’s campus at EMPAC and CBIS. This durational, in-progress work is open to the public to view as specially modified for the EMPAC Theater between 12pm and 1pm, Friday May 23rd. 

This is a project that pays homage to Nam June Paik’s world’s first satellite artwork “Good morning, Mr. Orwell”, happened 40 years ago in 1984. This project refers to George Orwell’s novel “1984”, depicting the totalitarian regime by the dictator Big Brother, governed through the telescreen that has both function of television and surveillance camera.

To invert this scenario, Paik made this project to envision media art as the means of liberation from totalitarian society, transmitted simultaneously in New York and Paris. In the time of ongoing war and mass death, we wanted to respond our political situation through connecting the dead and the living.

The project also negotiates and reflect on nuclear history and memory between U.S., working with existing footage from films on nuclear history. (For example, Hiroshima, Mon Amour in 1959). The project asks what has been removed or marginalized unconsciously from the representation on nuclear history and bring that negotiation into representation, bringing the past into present. The project perceives culture and memory as river, water, flow and relations. The project stands as trans cultural, trans-pacific viewpoint instead of binary oppositions between countries. By doing so, the project aims to bring healing to the collective trauma of wars in history through performance and video projection, through the contemplation on death, and continuation of afterlife to non-human entity.

During the period of “The Day of the Dead” in Mexico in November 2024, we plan to screen 2 video works in Oaxaca, Mexico and Izumo, Japan at the same time as a transmission from this world to afterlife. My film “Fate of Love” (2024) and Shinya Watanabe’s “Meeting My Dead Father in Oaxaca, Mexico” (2024) both explore death and love. During the screening, I myself will perform on top of the projection during the screening as human silhouette in homage to artist Ana Mendieta who also made a performance artwork Silueta Series (Silhouette) near Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. Izumo in Japan is known for the sacred place where all the spirit gods gather once a year during the month of November that coincides with the same period when “The Day of the Dead” happens in Mexico.

Celebrate the collaboration between the Rensselaer Orchestra and the Empire State Youth Orchestra (ESYO) as they perform side-by-side April 5 at 2pm in EMPAC Concert Hall.  

This spring program features the breathtaking Elysium by Samy Moussa, the famous Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz, and the evocative Oboe Concerto by Thomas L. Read, featuring 2024 Rensselaer Concerto Competition winner Gianna Scire, Class of 2025, as soloist.

On Saturday, February 22, RMA will be hosting our annual Pops Concert! Our mythology themed Pops Concert is next Saturday (2/22) at 2pm in EMPAC Concert Hall! Come watch all the amazing performances! 

Join the West Point Band for “West Point on the March,” an exploration of the most classic American military musical genre: the march, featuring some of Sousa’s best-known works alongside lively selections like “Americans We” and Ethel Smyth’s anthem of women’s suffrage, “March of the Women.” The West Point Brass Quintet will showcase the powerful music of a New Orleans funeral, followed by stirring pieces inspired by the 1963 March on Washington, including Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The concert wraps up with the unforgettable movie marches from “Indiana Jones” and “The Music Man.” 

February 7th, 2025 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)

Hosted by Rensselyrics

[Event Program]
Featuring:
Dobbs 16 | The Masters School, Dobbs Ferry, NY
Encore | Plattsburgh High School, Plattsburgh, NY
Fermata Nowhere | Stafford Middle School, Plattsburgh, NY
For Good Measure | Mohonasen High School, Schenectady, NY
Foxtones | Fox Lane High School, Bedford, NY
Rhythm On Rye | Rye High School, Rye, NY
Stissingers | Stissing Mountain High School, Pine Plains, NY
Vocal Point | South Glens Falls High School, South Glens Falls NY

The top two finishing groups from this quarterfinal will advance to the ICHSA Northeast Semifinal

February 8th, 2025 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)

Hosted by Duly Noted / Rensselyrics

[Event Program]
Featuring:
A Sharp Arrangement | SUNY Potsdam
Allegrettos | Boston University
Audiophiles | Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Partial Credit | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Pitch Please | University at Albany
Potsdam Pitches | SUNY Potsdam
Potsdam Pointercounts | SUNY Potsdam
Rusty Pipes | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stay Tuned | SUNY Potsdam
Viridescent | University of Vermont

The top two finishing groups from this quarterfinal will advance to the ICCA Northeast Semifinal

Choreographer Leslie Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion. Cuyjet combines her own embodied archive of movement with looping archival, pre-recorded, and live-captured video in a multi-sided enclosure that serves as both projection screen and stage, dynamically shifting the viewer’s perspective on her bodily form over time.

Originally commissioned by The Kitchen (NYC) for an open-plan loft space, this evening-length performance now floats in the dark void of the EMPAC Theater, further emphasizing how Cuyjet displays and obscures herself—and her internal thoughts—amidst objects, images, and the camera’s lens.

Cuyjet grapples with questions of classism, privilege, and race that arise in her family’s archives and the legacy of her great aunt, Marion Cuyjet (1920–1996), a pioneer of 1950s dance education. As a teen, Marion Cuyjet passed as white to train in Philadelphia ballet schools and later created the Judimar School of Dance where Black dancers studied before they could do so at white studios, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Judith Jamison (1943–2024) and Philadanco’s Joan Myers Brown (b. 1931).

Layering her own memories of dance training many decades later alongside this complex family legacy, Leslie Cuyjet crafts a dense, fragmented, malleable, and intentionally oblique collage of memory within the sculptural structure and across her own body. With Marion at once fills in historical gaps and highlights where new fissures appear in the unstable relationship between self and the traces of the past that surround it.

This event is currently at capacity. Please arrive at the EMPAC box office on Level 7 30 minutes before the scheduled start time to be put on a waiting list for possible standby entry. Thank you. —The EMPAC Team

This year, the RPI Black Students’ Alliance Fashion Show is presented in partnership with EMPAC Research and PULSE, the RPI student group exploring electronic dance music.

Amid an era of rapid environmental transformation, this show asks: How can experimental and multisensory media reimagine the future of sustainable design? Visionary couture, innovative research, and cinematic and sonic explorations synthesize artistry, scientific progress, and eco-conscious ingenuity.

PULSE invigorates the runway with an original soundtrack, and extends the celebration with live DJ sets following the show. This student-led production and its showcase of BIPOC world-building challenges outdated paradigms and inspires a future rooted in sustainable creation. 

President Marty Schmidt ’81 and Mrs. Lyn Schmidt invite you to the RPI Bicentennial Holiday Concert, featuring performances by the Rensselaer Orchestra, Concert Choir, and Wind Symphony.

The program includes works by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Holst, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Richard Wagner, and Alexander Borodin.

The 2024 Rensselaer Concerto Competition winner, Luca Osborne ’24, will join the orchestra to perform the first movement from Jean Sibelius’ beloved Violin Concerto.

Free and open to the public. Refreshments to follow.
 

RPI, Opera Saratoga, and the Bergamot Quartet will present The Other Side of Silence, a new opera featuring synthetic and acoustic voices.

With music composed by RPI Lecturer Robert Whalen and libretto co-written by Faculty Fellow Katherine Skovira and Mark Steidl, a nonbinary person who uses augmentative and alternative communication, the opera tells the story of Zari, who uses new technology to overcome communication challenges despite opposition. This free workshop performance, part of the 2024 International Symposium on Assistive Technology for Music and Art, will take place on October 16, 2024, at RPI’s Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY.