More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.

In addition to its curatorial program EMPAC supports many campus events, including seven each year chosen and sponsored by the Arts Department/HASS. This is a graduate PhD thesis project.

A collaboration with J.T. Rinker, Meiko's Knole is an exploration of Knole House, a storied estate in Kent, United Kingdom, and the subject of recent research. Using archival film materials as a source of inspiration, Meiko's Knole blends performance, film and song in an attempt to collapse the opposition between fact and fiction.

Every year, the Rensselaer Department of the Arts programs seven events utilizing the infrastructure and support of the production teams at EMPAC. These productions often include final graduate thesis projects that are developed in the venues themselves.

Stick around at the end of Accepted Students Day to hear Rensselaer's own orchestra in its home, the spectacular EMPAC Concert Hall. This Spring, the Orchestra presents classics of the orchestral repertoire: Sergei Prokofiev's colorful suite of music from the film Lt. Kijé depicts the imaginary life of a Russian soldier brought into the world by way of clerical error. Tchaikovsky's rousing Slavonic March musically describes the rise out from under tyranny of an oppressed people. Finishing the program is Beethoven's grandest orchestral essay, his Symphony no. 5 in C Minor.

In the Fall of 2018, the Rensselaer Orchestra performed at New York City's Carnegie Hall. Hear why this flagship student ensemble has been so celebrated within the Rensselaer community.

This event brings together the work of New York-based artists and filmmakers Bahar Behbahani and Jon Wang as part of Short Shadows, an ongoing moving image series at EMPAC curated by Vic Brooks. The evening will engage themes and processes of displacement and longing, as well as narratives of transformation that run through Behbahani and Wang’s work.

Bahar Behbahani's We Were Missing A Present is a meditative study on the social and topographical transformations of the cultural landscape. By exploring the site of the garden as a place of contest, Behbahani seeks an alternative dynamic between power and control. United by her research-based practice, the various components of this project including moving image, brush strokes, body movement, sound, text, and water are utilized by Behbahani to provoke spatial memory while observing the inherent complexities of material resources. We Were Missing A Present re-imagines the historical structure of landscape, botany, migration, and the processes of colonization. Behbahani expresses sincere gratitude to Imani's family for facilitating the garden visits in Shiraz, Iran, and dedicates We Were Missing a Present to the people of Shiraz in the wake of recent flooding this week.

New York-based Iranian artist Bahar Behbahani’s work addresses her long-term conceptual dialogues with memory and loss. Through painting, video, and participatory performance, she revisits Iran’s psychogeographic landscapes. The Persian garden, a contested space marked by colonialism and seductive beauty, is a reoccurring site for reflection and recovery.

John Wang's From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances is comprised of drone footage of Hong Kong’s dragon gates, a series of gaps in modern high-rise buildings constructed to allow mythological dragons to fly from the mountains to the sea. Originally shot for a documentary, the work has since taken on a life of its own. In its different stagings, the footage has masqueraded as a personal screensaver (MUBI), wallpaper in a Chinatown motel (Images Festival), and as a location for a live soap opera taping (Triple Canopy). At EMPAC, a new iteration of Wang’s project will dematerialize into a wall of fog, finally revealing its true form as weather. As they describe, “fog is defined by a lack of visibility, but its opacity forms an image of its own.” The footage was originally developed with the support of Triple Canopy & Charlotte Feng Ford.

Jon Wang generates films, sculptures, and performances that question notions of representation and desire. Wang’s treatments of pace—at times drawing on techniques of voice-over narration, tenants of feng shui, and the day-to-day activities of silk worms—gesture towards the ways in which beings and their surroundings are in states of perpetual transition. In this sense, pace, as a techno-sensual material, both grounds and disrupts their atmospheric videos and installations.

Whether anchored in real or fictional scenarios, each artwork presented in the Short Shadows series stretches beyond a singular moment or place to foreground the political importance of unexpected historical interconnections. Mostly produced within the last decade, the artists’ films, videos, poetry, and performances presented here shine a light on cultural and historical events that may otherwise remain in shadow.

Program

• We Were Missing A Present (2019)
• By Bahar Behbahani
• Sound: Maciek Schejbal
• Text: Ghazal Mosadeq
• From its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances (2018)
• Written & Directed by Jon Wang
• Aerial Assistant: Hercules Lau
• Sound: Alex Wang, Yllis Wang, and Aaron Sanchez

In addition to its curatorial program EMPAC supports many campus events, including seven each year chosen and sponsored by the Arts Department/HASS. This is a graduate PhD thesis project.

A one-night performance of MG (aka I WANT A BABY! Reimagined)

Angela Beallor's presentation is a queer adaptation of Sergei Tret'iakov's 1926 play I Want a Baby! This performance condenses the Soviet-era play with contemporary overlays and additions of dancers! experimental sound! video projection! & much much more.

Come meet Milda Grignau, a cultural worker building a communal nursery who decides that she would also like to contribute a new proletarian citizen to the development of the new society. Explore themes of (queer) reproduction, eugenics, utopianism, and more as they relate to early Soviet Russia and our contemporary moment.

Every year, the Rensselaer Department of the Arts programs seven events utilizing the infrastructure and support of the production teams at EMPAC. These productions often include final graduate thesis projects that are developed in the venues themselves.

New York-based artists and filmmakers Jon Wang and Bahar Behbahani will be in residence in Studio 1 to develop a performance, which will be presented as part of the Short Shadows film series on March 29.

An evening of experimental video + sound art + poetic programming exploring interpretations and manifestations of passage. pas·sage brings together the artist’s video travelogues, field recordings + sound synthesis, and a code-generated text inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel to create a psychogeographic multisensory experience.

Quinn is a PhD student in the Electronic Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researching the connections between walking and writing, psychogeography, and remixological approaches to artmaking.

Every year, the Rensselaer Department of the Arts programs seven events utilizing the infrastructure and support of the production teams at EMPAC. These productions often include final graduate thesis projects that are developed in the venues themselves.

Rensselaer Piano Showcase features students in the studios of Professors Julia den Boer, Akina Yura, and Jingwen Tu, along with student pianists in the Chamber Music Ensembles course, under the diirecton of Professors Nicholas de Maison and Michael Century.  

For more information about this event please visit http://www.hass.rpi.edu/.

Johannes Goebel will present some of his work from the time before he came to Rensselaer to become EMPAC’s founding director. The perspectives and positions shining through his personal music, texts, and projects may shed some light on foundational aspects of EMPAC’s building and program.

When he became responsible for setting up and programming large environments for artistic production, Johannes Goebel stopped his own artistic practice. The power over facilities and production means granted to him as director appeared as a conflict of interest with his own artistic work. Between 1990 and 2002, he was the founding director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and Media ZKM Karlsruhe; the Institute became the largest studio and production environment in Germany for contemporary music and technology, including intermedia and interactive works, as well as scientific and engineering research. Coming to Rensselaer, he was involved in the design, specification, and construction of the EMPAC building, as well as establishing the curatorial and production teams, the artist-in-residence program, event programming, and research. This event may serve to consider his work and experience before he became “institutionalized” and the role it has played in his approach to creating opportunities for others to create new works.

The program of the evening will be a collage of widely varying projects ranging from computer-generated music and music for custom-built instruments to the recitation of non-scientific reflections on computers, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. It will include examples from his years in the field of “free improvisation with non-traditional instruments” to projects realized with dancers, architects, and visual artists.

Drinks and snacks will be served.

For more information about this event please visit the RMA Facebook event.