News

EMPAC announces their Spring 2024 season. From January through May, EMPAC presents a robust slate of interdisciplinary programming—concerts, film screenings, dance, talks, and a two-day transducer symposium—that furthers its mission of gathering artists, thinkers, and audiences together to explore the boundaries of art, science, and technology.

Troy, NY: EMPAC / the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center and the Department of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute jointly announce Reembodied Sound 2024: A Festival and Symposium on Transducer-based Music and Sonic Art, February 2–3, 2024. Project submissions due Friday, November 17, 2023.

Deep Listening: Creativity, Accessibility, and Well-being is a three-day symposium of workshops, performances, and talks that explore listening, participation, and accessibility through both technological innovation and creative practice. September 28-30, 2023 | Open to the Public | Free

Beginning in September with a pair of artist studio talks and conversations followed by two full-scale productions, the EMPAC curatorial team and artists in residence announce their programs through December, where audiences of creatives, technologists, and arts enthusiasts can share in their investigations of travel and migration, materials and acoustics, cultural and geological histories, and more.

The EMPAC 2023 Fall Season celebrates 15 years of commissions, artist residencies, and public programs at the center for arts and technology.

Adams will lead and support curatorial projects across the time-based arts and build out other aspects of EMPAC’s programming. The expanded curatorial team will maintain its overall approach encompassing music, time-based visual art, and dance/theater as well as its emphasis on commissions, residencies, and publications with US and international artists.

The New York State DanceForce Member Search Committee has just concluded a four-month long statewide search for new members. Those selected will officially become new members on July 1, 2023 and will design their first projects to occur during the July 2024 to June 2025 project cycle.

EMPAC/ the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer received a $75,000 grant from Teiger Foundation for the exhibition Shifting Center (October 28–November 19, 2023), which is curated by Vic Brooks, Associate Director and Senior Curator of Time-Based Visual Art, and Nida Ghouse, Curator-in-Residence.

Watch Live, Mar 4, 2023.

Troy, NY–On November 22, industry leader and global influencer Film Independent announced that Martine Syms, Rocket Caleshu, and Vic Brooks have been nominated for the John Cassavetes Award for The African Desperate by the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Johannes Goebel, a champion of computer music in Germany who was hired at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2001 as a consultant on what was described as the world's first university-based center for technology and the arts before being named its founding director the following year, is retiring in November.

Martine Syms’s debut feature derives its title from a Freudian slip. In the opening scene, as Palace (Diamond Stingily), a sculptor at an upstate New York art school, describes her thesis project to an all-white faculty panel, she mispronounces “African diaspora” as “African desperate.”

EMPAC is one of the largest employers of students on the Rensselaer campus and uses an “apprenticeship model” to train student workers. We currently have approximately 52 students working in a variety of positions across the box office, front-of-house, production (audio, video, stage, IT), curatorial, design, web, marketing, research, and administrative teams.