Think about the last time you went to recess.

It was a genuine break in the middle of the day. Not a race to eat what you could before returning to work, not an opportunity to do errands, or to catch up on sleep—you used to put aside the work and play.

Think: Did recess ever have to go away?

EMPAC is bringing it back. Stop in at Evelyn’s Café on Level 5 any time from Noon to 2PM on Wednesday, September 2. Forget about work for a while, grab some lunch, chat with friends, and enjoy music by energetic bands sure to get you moving in a variety of ways.

Sing, dance, lie back, let loose, and enjoy Recess like you used to.

Everyone in Troy knows the river. Few know what lies beneath it.

Night falls over Troy. An unnatural fog rises from the Hudson, extinguishing every light. From within the mist comes the desperate signal of a steamboat, but no vessel can be seen.

Local legend tells of a steamer destroyed by a mysterious explosion more than a century ago, its burning wreck drifting for days before sinking beneath the waters. Sailors whispered it was no accident—something ancient emerged from the fog, claimed the ship, and has waited below ever since . . .

Now the fog has returned. And it’s calling for a new crew to enter the depths.

Will you follow it Beneath the Hudson?

Inspired by Troy's maritime past, EMPAC transforms local history into a supernatural adventure for one night only. Be part of the story as you journey through the haunted remains of the lost vessel. You’ll encounter ghostly sailors, forgotten lockkeepers, strange river creatures, and the relentless pull of an unseen guide. Uncover what happened on board the ship, and see if you can escape the curse before it claims you, too.

The adventure spills throughout EMPAC with Halloween festivities for all ages. Trick-or-treat through the building, pose with a treasure trove of theatrical props from Proctors Theatre, and grab a spooky snack at Evelyn’s Café. Halloween movies screen all evening, while Troy’s FlagSSSDay Collective leads a hands-on craft activity and brings out regalia from its legendary Crow Procession (keep an eye out for crows flocking throughout the party!). Make masks for the party that can also be worn at the Crow Procession on December 12th. 

Before the night is through, cheer on the costume contest with guest judges—or take the stage yourself. After the kids head home, the lights go down and the party gets darker with a DJ and cash bar.

Queer performance artist Jibz Cameron, best known for her multimedia alter ego Dynasty Handbag, comes to EMPAC for an evening of performance and readings from her memoir, Hell in a Handbag.

The book traces Cameron’s singular perspective from a childhood spent with hippie clowns in Northern California, through making morbid zines as a teenager in the East Bay punk scene, to encounters with misogyny in New York City’s avant-garde theater scene. Frank and funny, Cameron writes candidly about addiction, mental illness, her mother’s suicide, and the experiences that eventually gave rise to Dynasty Handbag and her commentary on contemporary life.

For the performance, both Jibz Cameron and Dynasty Handbag appear onstage, telling the story of these intimately intertwined halves of one artist.

Go down the Dynasty Handbag rabbit hole.

One night isn’t enough. Jibz Cameron’s memoir, Hell in a Handbag, takes the story considerably further.

Get the book→

Before the show, explore 25 years of performances, videos, photographs, and other evidence from Cameron's life before and after Dynasty Handbag.

Explore the 25-year archive →

“Hilarious and extraordinarily original.”
—Paper Magazine

Subscribe for updates:

How does perception connect to bodily action? What happens when your perceptual system changes? How can art and science each help us make meaning from those shifts?

Choreographer Heidi Latsky and Brett Fajen, who is an associate dean at RPI and a professor in cognitive science, join for a conversation on movement science, the brain’s perceptual functions, and how the body adapts to change.

Fajen’s research on perception, action, visual control, and movement in complex environments opens questions on how learning takes place in the body and how the body adapts to changing situations and perceptual systems. Alongside a screening from her documentary film, Living in the Grey (2025), which shares dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities impacting information processing, movement control, and sensory input, Latsky discusses how perception functions in her creative process.

Together, they find the overlaps of their creative and research projects, and the possibilities for intuitive knowledge to influence how we understand the brain and body.

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

What can sound mean for humans and the environment? And how can immersive audio environments clarify—or create—these meanings?

Researcher and artist Felix Deufel, who is the director of ZiMMT (Center for Media Art, Music, and Technology) in Leipzig, joins RPI composer and technologist Matthew Goodheart to talk about spatial sound, acoustics, composition, and their effects on human experience.

Their conversation considers sound not simply as something we hear, but as something that locates us in space and shapes our relationships to our surroundings. Through their respective artistic and technological practices, Deufel and Goodheart discuss how new tools for spatial audio can become instruments for composition, perception, and experimentation.

Deufel also facilitates a workshop on his audio software Grapes 3D on Friday, October 9. 
An installation of his work can be heard on the 39-speaker ambisonic system of EMPAC Studio 1 on Saturday, October 10.

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

How might quantum physics help us think about living with uncertainty?

For the first Interface talk of the year, artist and composer Rucyl Mills joins physicist and computing pioneer Chris Lirakis for a conversation on how artists and scientists approach things they cannot fully see, predict, or understand.

Together, they explore how we grapple with phenomena that exceed ordinary perception: states of possibility, emergence, vibration, and the unseen forces that shape our world. Interface invites us to consider what happens when research becomes creative practice and creativity becomes a form of investigation.

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

Interface is a monthly series at EMPAC that brings artists, engineers, scientists, and designers together to talk about how they actually make and think. Rather than presenting finished work, the series focuses on what happens along the way—experiments, questions, failures, intuitions, and discoveries that change the direction of a project.  

The premise is simple: researchers talk about their creative process, and artists talk about their research. What happens when we look across disciplines at the different ways people approach a problem, test an idea, or follow something they don’t yet understand?

Interface takes place on the second Thursday of the month. The evening may include performances, demonstrations, sketches, prototypes, code, sound tests, or other materials drawn from participants’ work. Every talk is followed by food and drink at Evelyn’s Café, with time to keep the conversation going.

Interface aims to become a regular place for people to meet one another, share ideas, and build a culture of curiosity across disciplines. All are welcome.
 

*Contains strobe effects 

The lingering afterimages of bright lights on our retinas after we move into darkness, the sonic echoes of a passing car’s thundering bass, the hallucinations that emerge just before sleep—our bodies preserve the residues of lived experience in strange, unexpected ways. More acutely still, some beings experience a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity, or a "death rally”: an unexpected, deeply unreliable resurgence of vitality at the threshold of death.

In Terminal Lucidity, artist P. Staff casts these elusive phenomena back into our bodies, in collaboration with lighting designer Josephine Wang, composer Lukas Frank, animator Adam Sinclair, and programmer Joseph Stewart. An algorithmically randomized constellation of moving image, light, and sound ensures that no two encounters unfold in the same way. The single-channel video work extends out from the screen, shimmering behind our eyelids and drumming in our ears.

Originally conceived for the galleries and elliptical staircase of the Complesso dell'Ospedaletto—a Venetian care home founded in 1527 for the sick and dying—Terminal Lucidity at EMPAC is its first presentation in the United States. It inhales and exhales through eerily biochemical fields of saturated color, punctuated by rhythmic cycles of light and darkness. Likewise suspended between ascent and descent, sensory overload and uneasy calm, the soundtrack shifts abruptly between orchestral fragments, field recordings, muffled room tones, and distant reverberations. Terminal Lucidity leaves us with an unsettling question: if our bodies remember even after the known world disappears, can we relinquish control?
 

Sound is our first sense. Before birth we encounter the world through vibration, developing an embodied understanding of relation long before language. Vibrations of sound move through air, water, skin, and bone, crossing boundaries with ease. Sound is both immaterial and deeply physical: an event continually unfolding between bodies and environments.

At EMPAC, Untitling transforms the listening space into a site for reflection on how sound exceeds systems of categorization. Through careful attention to resonance, vibration, and environmental detail, the installation proposes listening as a practice of reciprocity—one that foregrounds our entanglement with the living world and opens possibilities for experiencing place as dynamic, interconnected, and continually becoming.

Developed through recordings gathered in exchange with forests, waterways, grasslands, deserts, and urban environments, the composition dissolves distinctions between environmental sound and synthesis. Electronic frequencies emerge not as simulations of nature but as another living presence within a shared ecology of vibration. Rather than documenting place, the work proposes listening itself as a form of placemaking.

Composed of field recordings and voice altered through playback, as well as synthesis, Untitling invites audiences into an evolving sonic environment where sound becomes a way of sensing ecological interdependence, memory, and place beyond the limits of language. Fragments of place emerge, dissolve, and return, inviting listeners to inhabit duration rather than resolution.

In these shifting resonances, Untitling imagines sound and acoustic ecology not as representation, but as an active participant in shaping right relations between bodies, technologies, and the living world.

As you listen, imagine each being inhabiting its most abounding state. Consider what becomes possible when listening is understood not as observation, but as reciprocity. Consider how sound and listening become a means of tending, remembrance, and return.

Paul Abbott and Edward George develop music for The Strangeness of Drumming—a duo concert of improvised music that stretches from Abbott's experimental practice (notably his 2026 album Slip) into hip-hop, R&B, and the rhythmic philosophies of D'Angelo, J Dilla, and Sly Dunbar.