EMPAC Announces Spring 2024 Season
Troy, NY: EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 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.
EMPAC Spring 2024 public programs include:
Barobar Jagtana (January 11) is a screening of Suneil Sanzgiri’s vivid trilogy of short films, presented in the Capital Region for the first time.
Poetry & Fairy Tale (January 19) is a striking new lineup of Brahms, Tod Moellenberg, David Fulmer, Rebecca Saunders, and Ravel, in recital by pianist and composer Conrad Tao, hailed “the kind of musician who is shaping the future of classical music” (New York Magazine).
µ (mu) (January 24) is the newest project from composer and artist Marina Rosenfeld 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.
Reembodied Sound 2024 (February 2–3) 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.
Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in (February 9) brings filmmaker Shen Xin, performer Ali Van, and the debut of their collaborative project AX Archive in a multi-facted evening that includes an American film premiere and a playful improvisation with spatialized audio, where audience members are encouraged to participate.
A Plot / A Scandal (February 16 & 17) by dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis as "master of ceremonies" (2023 Der Faust Prize) in a two-night presentation of the East Coast’s only chance this spring to see the award winning production taking up “plot” in its multiple meanings.
Akoma (March 15) invites audiences to join the interactive landscape of sound and light from electronic musician and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jlin and visual artist Florence To, as they develop their new concert production at EMPAC this spring.
The world premiere of Susceptible Chambers (April 5) by composer-performers Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino, began with the re-construction of a simple microphone and draws the audience into an unusual, idiosyncratic, and playful sonic and visual world.
Space Carcasses (April 23) 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.
Inimitable Afro-gothic composer and vocalist M. Lamar, who “deconstructs the persona of the diva even as he wraps himself in divalike hauteur” (Hilton Als, New Yorker), closes out EMPAC’s Spring 2024 season with Machines and other intergalactic technologies of the spirit (May 3), in a collaboration with experimental music duo The Living Earth Show as part of their ongoing residency at EMPAC.
Additionally, EMPAC is pleased to present a curated set of free lectures, no ticket required, with appearances from visiting scholars:
- André Lepecki (January 25) on choreographic works that challenge the ideas of time as a technology for policing movement;
- Marina Vishmidt (February 22) on art, labor, and value, reflecting on projects from EMPAC’s archive;
- Ezekiel Dixon-Román (March 21) on computation influenced by black radical anti-colonial thought, cybernetics, and critical philosophies of technology;
- Peli Grietzer (April 11) on art’s structures in relation to architectures of artificial intelligence.
Ticketing and event info available now.
General admission single tickets for all performances are $20, and EMPAC offers $15 reduced price tickets for ages 55+, students, and RPI faculty. Single tickets for the film/video evenings are $10.
RPI students can purchase advance tickets for any event at a reduced rate of $6, or gain a free student rush ticket at the door with RPI ID by joining EMPAC+.
No reservations are necessary for talks, tours, and works-in-progress, which are free to attend.
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