Standing in the middle of the Studio 1 black box at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Ute Besenecker says, “There’s no better space to do this work.” In four corners of the room, the Ph.D. architecture candidate and her small undergraduate research team have constructed isolated light environments consisting of curved screens, heavy black curtains, and a rig of different overhead lights.
Argeo Ascani has to be clear and concise. His position demands it. As Music Curator for Troy, New York’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC), the way in which he experiences music must lean toward the efficient and the critical. He represents the model of the working listener: a person who must absorb music with a number of prescribed, often non-musical, considerations in mind.
In a conversation with the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, EMPAC music curator Argeo Ascani discussed how the premise of "experimentation" at EMPAC eliminates the traditional idea of "risk" in arts programming by replacing it with an ongoing process of tiny successes and failures.
This fall finds a number of long-term residential projects premiering new work, including Ant Hampton’s interactive theater piece The Extra People and Mark Fell’s Recursive Frame Analysis, the musician and installation artist’s first foray into choreography.
In the summer of 2015, two Rensselaer students will be afforded unprecedented resources and support to undertake projects at the forefront of their academic fields. The Jaffe Student Production Competition is pleased to announce that PhD architecture candidate Ute C. Besenecker and PhD arts candidate Ryan Ross Smith have been selected as the inaugural winners of the competition, which was open to students of all schools and departments. Each will receive full funding and technical support for a summer residency at the Curtis R.
It’s 10 p.m. in Rotterdam, Netherlands, when Emily Zimmerman, associate curator of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Skypes artist Melvin Moti from a cluttered workspace in the Rensselaer Science Center. A team of undergraduate students eagerly assemble the components of their project on a workbench and Zimmerman turns the laptop so Moti can assess their progress. It’s mid-October and the group have only a few weeks left to iron out the bugs in The Vision Machine before it’s scheduled to be installed on the EMPAC mezzanine on December 4.
Six years after its debut at the opening festival for the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), one of EMPAC’s first commissioned works, There is Still Time . . Brother, will be presented this fall at the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, China.
TROY, NY — In a talk on October 15th entitled Speaking So to Speak, EMPAC director Johannes Goebel talks of art and language.
-->
The 2015 Jaffe Student Production Competition is open to any undergraduate or graduate student at Rensselaer. It aims to create projects, which are developed to take advantage of EMPAC’s infrastructure and of the expertise of EMPAC’s team. The winner(s) of the competition receive a summer production residency at EMPAC. The prize comprises the following components:
On Wednesday May 28th at 7:30PM EDT EMPAC will be featured as part of WHMT's AHA! (A House for Arts) series. Tune in to learn more about "a state-of-the-art space for performance, musical, & electronic arts that supports artists from around the world." We will post the video here are soon as it becomes available to us after it airs.
Watch it now!
Funded Summer Research Project in Scientific Data Exploration for undergraduate and graduate students
Frieze Film is a program of five new artist films co-commissioned by Frieze Foundation and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The films will subsequently be screened on Channel 4 television in the UK to coincide with Frieze London.