This year, the RPI BSA Fashion Show is introduced as Fashion Engineered, a student-led, multidisciplinary showcase featuring designers and artists from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and beyond.

Fashion Engineered celebrates originality in all its forms. Each featured piece encapsulates a distinct design language, shaped by the creator’s background, process, and vision. From experimental silhouettes and unconventional materials to technology-informed construction and conceptual storytelling, the work on display rejects uniformity in favor of thoughtful, intentional design. These pieces are not simply garments or artworks, but reflections of problem-solving, cultural narratives, and creative risk-taking.

The accompanying art exhibition further amplifies this individuality, presenting works that explore texture, movement, sound, and form. Together, the runway and gallery space highlight how unique approaches to design can coexist, converse, and push boundaries. Centering BIPOC world-building and local voices, Fashion Engineered challenges traditional notions of fashion and art, inviting audiences to engage with design as an evolving practice rooted in innovation, sustainability, and self-expression.

2026 Livestream - Fashion Engineered

2025 show, Eco-Futurism

with Rueangrith Suntisuk, Pornpan Arayaveerasid, Aaron David Ross, Alex Gvojic, Michael Beharie

The Ghost takes us by the hand is a new EMPAC commission that blends performance, video, and sound. Built on an inversion of the theater and its usual mode of address, the work unfolds in, over, and around the traditional fixed seating of the auditorium, with the audience seated on the stage. Video appears on clouds of fog; the performance overtakes the playhouse as its architecture pulses with light and sound. When the empty house of the theater is gradually seized by an atmospheric presence and choral score, a single dancer emerges within and above the rows of seats, drawn from this charged zone—as if a glitch has transmuted image into flesh.

Arunanondchai integrates performance into his live and recorded works. His investigations into animistic afterlives and spiritual technologies in Southeast Asia span the sacred and profane. The Ghost takes us by the hand takes cues from Asian horror films, using atmosphere—sonic, choreographic, visual, spiritual—as a primary medium for performance. The work disorients spectatorship and tests the boundaries between film and live action. Arunanondchai asks, What happens when ghosts haunt a place we think we already know? Are we merely watching—or are we instead witnessing, absorbing deep pasts and projecting new possible futures? After the performance, the stage shifts to present an installation of the video Unity for Nostalgia—a work that extends the questions of the performance, drawing on strategies also used in the performance such as thermal imaging and atmosphere. The work reflects on the power of historical myths and ancestral stories to shape experience in the present.

Presented in partnership with the Rensselaer County Regional Chamber of Commerce, this free, family-friendly event invites you to celebrate the season with music, community, and festive refreshments. The concert will feature performances by the RPI Orchestra, Concert Choir, and Wind Symphony, including works by Smetana, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, Lauridsen, and Saint-Saëns.

Registration is required.

Jewyo Rhii’s Wing Theater, commissioned by EMPAC, is at once a self-contained theater, a sculptural archive, and a staging ground for storytelling. The installation uses walls that store objects, automated structures, and simple moving elements to give physical shape to personal and public stories, which are shown through precise gestures and motions. The project oscillates between installation and activated performance space, with Rhii offering two live activations daily throughout the festival.

At its base is a large-scale structure composed of six wings, each carrying an assembly of sculptures, images, and projections. These wings become engines for conversation—speaking with ghosts from Rhii’s past, with those who assert power by seizing and privatizing public space, and with the audience gathered in the studio. Throughout staging grounds, Wing Theater subtly spreads out across the studio, setting its stories in motion. In Studio 1, the piece evokes the atmosphere of an artist’s studio transformed into a dynamic stage—blurring the boundary between private process and collective encounter.

Wing Theater asks what it means to make, act, and think in the world as an artist. Two narrative trajectories extend across its physical structure. Viewed front to back, a series of vignettes charts Rhii’s path from her formation as an artist in Seoul, to her nomadic years working across Europe, and to her time in Queens, New York. Back to front, Wing Theater is a meditation on how the rapid pace of urban development transforms both people and place.

Widely recognized for her installations and her practice spanning sculpture, video, and performance, Jewyo Rhii approaches art-making as a mode of shared experience. Her work is marked by a sensitivity to the afterlives of artistic practice, and to the small, intimate acts that quietly shape collective histories.

Each performance is 60 minutes in duration.

Jewyo Rhii’s Wing Theater, commissioned by EMPAC, is at once a self-contained theater, a sculptural archive, and a staging ground for storytelling. The installation uses walls that store objects, automated structures, and simple moving elements to give physical shape to personal and public stories, which are shown through precise gestures and motions. The project oscillates between installation and activated performance space, with Rhii offering two live activations daily throughout the festival.

At its base is a large-scale structure composed of six wings, each carrying an assembly of sculptures, images, and projections. These wings become engines for conversation—speaking with ghosts from Rhii’s past, with those who assert power by seizing and privatizing public space, and with the audience gathered in the studio. Throughout staging grounds, Wing Theater subtly spreads out across the studio, setting its stories in motion. In Studio 1, the piece evokes the atmosphere of an artist’s studio transformed into a dynamic stage—blurring the boundary between private process and collective encounter.

Wing Theater asks what it means to make, act, and think in the world as an artist. Two narrative trajectories extend across its physical structure. Viewed front to back, a series of vignettes charts Rhii’s path from her formation as an artist in Seoul, to her nomadic years working across Europe, and to her time in Queens, New York. Back to front, Wing Theater is a meditation on how the rapid pace of urban development transforms both people and place.

Widely recognized for her installations and her practice spanning sculpture, video, and performance, Jewyo Rhii approaches art-making as a mode of shared experience. Her work is marked by a sensitivity to the afterlives of artistic practice, and to the small, intimate acts that quietly shape collective histories.

Each performance is 60 minutes in duration.

• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
• 6:30, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
• 1:30 + 4PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / No reservation necessary
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2026
• 3PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026
• 3PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 1PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP

The Rensselaer Music Association is delighted to present our Fall Showcase Concert in the EMPAC Concert Hall on November 13th at 7PM. Six of our groups will be performing an exciting selection of music spanning across all different genres. From classical wind ensemble to jazz and rock & roll, there will be music for everyone to enjoy!

Ensembles:

Symphonic Band, Flute Choir, Clarinet Choir, Trumpet Troupe, Dirty Work, Collar City.

FREE and open to the public!  

Jewyo Rhii is in residence to develop her forthcoming commission with EMPAC. Designed as a “storytelling machine,” Rhii’s work is a large architecture circulating a series of set pieces, paintings, and ephemeral objects. While in residence, Rhii works with EMPAC’s Stage Technology engineers to prototype the project’s mobile structure.

Am I Enough of Me: theatrical production and research project at EMPAC Theater

Am I Enough of Me concerns individuality and timing. This theatrical performance tells the story of what can happen when our dreams are put on hold. Three college graduates must choose between their passion projects and a dystopian corporate future. Their choice is explored through multiple mediums including musical theater, augmented reality, AI video, audience interaction, and art song.

This production is also a research project studying how individuals influence one another in performance spaces. Note that the audience seating area will be video recorded. Audience members can opt in to providing written feedback and participating in a talkback session with the writer/director and actors after the show. Primary topics of the research include imagination, embodiment, narrative told through multiple mediums, and performance.

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.