Every day, Greenland loses 600 million tons of ice. Most people cannot perceive this. Sound artist Felix Deufel and video artist Lucas Gutierrez made it tangible—as sound, space, and embodied experience.

Lost in Liquid Noise is an immersive audio-driven experience based on two Arctic expeditions (2023 & 2024). It reveals the hidden sonic and visual dimensions of climate change—from glacier ruptures to underwater ecosystems beneath frozen seas.

At the core of Lost in Liquid Noise is noise as both a physical and metaphorical condition—environmental overload, continuous transformation, and loss of control. Water shifts between ice, liquid, and vapor, reflecting an unstable system. In its immersive audio installation at EMPAC, the audience moves through evolving sonic textures, from subtle crystalline movements to massive glacial ruptures and underwater acoustic ecologies. The experience oscillates between microscopic detail and planetary scale, fragile stillness and overwhelming intensity. Rather than explaining climate change, the work makes it directly perceptible as a spatial and physical experience.

Felix Deufel, sound artist and founder of Not a Number Studio and ZiMMT (Center for Immersive Media Arts, Music and Technology) presents his software Grapes 3D Audio Control, a universal 3D audio control software designed for live performance, show control, and the composition of spatial audio formats.

Grapes integrates effortlessly into diverse production and performance workflows, working with a wide range of 3D audio processors and DAWs as well as live setups. Available both as a VST3 plugin and a standalone application, it offers a creative and fast workflow for choreographing sound objects, enabling an intuitive and expressive approach to spatial composition across music, film, theater, and the arts.

Participants should bring their own laptop (Mac or Windows).

Register for the Grapes 3D Workshop

Can AI resurrect the past? Can it bring back people we have lost? How real or fake are the results—and the relationships that emerge when we try to connect with them?

Theater maker Haruna Lee and multimedia theater director and designer Jared Mezzocchi sit down with Anthem Award–winning AI strategy consultant Kento Morita for a conversation on the creative possibilities and pitfalls of working with chatbots, translators, and new prototypes to create human connection onstage. 

Together, they discuss AI’s capacity to process large data sets of archival material into interactive, improvisational exchanges that aim to feel like versions of a person, simulating personal relationships. 

As collaborators on DADBOT, a new theater project in development at EMPAC, the trio conjures Lee’s deceased father for an audience, using interactive media and live performance to stage irreverent conversations with the DADBOT. They discuss their prototyping process, design sprints, and how using AI for theater emphasizes urgent questions of reality, authenticity, and ethics.

Stay afterwards for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café. This event is part of Corpus Festival 2027.

ABACUS is a large-scale multimedia presentation inspired in part by Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope (a planned data visualization device that would comprehensively model the Earth’s “vital statistics,” historic patterns, and future projections) and by two dominant forms of persuasive discourse today: TED-style presentations and megachurch media design.

ABACUS features a charismatic lecturer, Paul Abacus, aided by the Geoscope and a chorus of Steadicam operators, who argues the obsolescence of national borders and proposes their dissolution. ABACUS serves as an interrogation of the art of persuasion as a catalyst for cultural evolution, examining the moment that data—distilled, visualized, spun—yields a visceral, rather than merely conceptual, impact.

At EMPAC, Director Lars Jan and his team of designers and programmers worked on creating their Geoscope, an array of curved projection surfaces which displays visuals generated from archived and real-time geographical, environmental, and financial data culled from governmental agencies and public datasets on the Internet. Additional residencies developed the integration of two Steadicam operators and live imagery into the piece.

Can a group of people occupy the same imagined world at the same time, in the same physical space? How can we share experience through mixed reality?

Multidisciplinary artist Lars Jan and Talis Reks, who is the lab manager of MIT.nano Immersion Lab and a CEO/founder of DreaMR Labs, discuss the possibilities of combining mixed reality, narrative, and live performance—at stadium-sized scale.

In their individual work, they each integrate physical and imagined worlds through emerging technologies. Currently, they are collaborating on ROAM, a large-scale, outdoor, immersive performance in development at EMPAC. Jan’s directing and writing builds narratives for live audiences actively moving through events rather than seated outside them. Improvisation and failure are part of the process for testing Reks’s XR system architecture: untethered headsets, networking, tracking, and synchronization for forty bodies in motion across a stadium field. ROAM’s combination of live performance and immersive virtual layers generates a unique metaphysical experience.

Stay afterward for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café.

What artistic and expressive possibilities emerge at the intersection of robotics and art making? How might technology augment the creative body?

Musician, composer, and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins RPI’s Russell Sage Professor John Wen for a conversation on the relationships between bodies, machines, perception, and creative practice.

Together, they consider how advances in robotics can create new possibilities for artists and how artistic experimentation can pose new questions for robotics. What new system-theoretic tools are necessary for advances in robotics and their application to creative projects? How do these tools intersect with artistic practices and do-it-yourself approaches to developing new hardware?

Through examples from their work, Lu and Wen explore what happens when machines become more than tools: collaborators, instruments, extensions of the body, and platforms for experimentation.

Stay afterward for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café.

Composer Micaela Tobin, choreographer Jay Carlon, and their team facilitate a workshop on their process for choreographing grief. In this Be the Media! workshop, participants learn how the artists draw on personal experience and shared culture to generate interdisciplinary media in performance. 

Their collaborative project, WAKE, is a celebratory ritual for grief that centers queer Filipino life and processes both personal and communal loss through a combination of sound, dance, and video projection. Tobin uses electronics to dissect her vocals, creating dense sonic worlds that blur opera, drone, and noise. Carlon’s visual language stages bodily movement and video projection to mediate between performers, audience, and memory. During their Be the Media! workshop at The Sanctuary, the artists screen video material from WAKE and lead attendees through aspects of their process.

Just after the hour-long workshop, hang out with the artists over a bite to eat. The following day, visit EMPAC to experience a live excerpt of the work in progress.

Choreographer Jay Carlon and composer Micaela Tobin reimagine WAKE, an immersive performance ritual for grief that brings together the dance floor and boxing ring with the Filipino concept of kapwa—shared identity and interconnectedness. While in residence at EMPAC, the team expands the work’s club-like stage and projection design, imagining a new future for WAKE after the sudden passing of beloved cast member and collaborator láwû makuriye’nte shortly after its 2024 premiere in Los Angeles.

Part requiem, part reckoning, WAKE is a performance ritual toward liberation. Combining the languages of queer nightlife, Catholicism, and combat, Jay Carlon’s choreography and Micaela Tobin’s live vocal performance demand space for release, remembrance, and reclamation. Grounded in kapwa—a Filipino concept of shared identity and interconnectedness—WAKE invites participants to confront one of life’s most difficult realities—death—and to gather in celebration of each other and our ancestors, past and future.   

Carlon steps into the boxing ring of memory to confront a grief that is at once personal and inherited. WAKE was created through a period of profound personal loss, including the deaths of loved ones whose memories and spirits move through the work, and through the disorientation of mourning across oceans and borders. But WAKE extends beyond autobiography. 

Through movement, sound, and collective experience, WAKE brings the larger conditions that shape diasporic life—colonialism, cultural displacement, inherited trauma—into an ongoing search for resistance, transformation, and belonging. What begins as a solo unfolds into a shared rite, dissolving the boundary between stage and public: a prayer, a provocation, a party.  
  
Join us for an excerpt from WAKE, followed by a conversation with the artistic team, and encounter the work as it evolves toward its revival as part of Corpus Festival 2027. For a deeper dive, attend a workshop and meal with the artists on Wednesday, September 23 at 5PM at the Sanctuary for Independent Media.