Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener are at EMPAC for a lecture and demonstration of their work for the New York State Dance Force annual convening, which will take place at EMPAC this year.

Mitchell and Riener have been working together since 2010 when they worked in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Since then the duo has developed numerous small and large scale works that have been produced worldwide. The artists were last at EMPAC for a remote residency to work on their current project Desire Lines, which they will continue to develop at EMPAC. They also previously worked at EMPAC in 2016 with Charles Atlas for Tesseract curated by Vic Brooks.

This private showing is co-produced with the New York State DanceForce.

Sound artist and musician Tim Bruniges will be in residence with support from the Australia Council for the Arts. Through the use of live, regenerating audio systems his performance and installation projects aim to foreground the volumetric, tactile experience of sound. During his residency Bruniges will work with live audio, tape, and EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array to develop new work.

In 2019 Bruniges was awarded a PhD for his research on live sound installation practice and was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award and Research Excellence award from UNSW Art & Design. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts from COFA, UNSW, and a Bachelor of Arts (Mus) with distinction from the University of Western Sydney. His works have been exhibited in Australia, USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Iceland, Russia, and Dubai, and written about in Artsy, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. His work is held in private collections and at Artbank Australia. 

Supported by the Flanders Department of Culture, Youth and Media, Marco Fusi is in residence in Studio 1 with Patricia Alessandrini to work on EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array.

Fusi’s work with Wave Field Synthesis expands his research and performance practice through a collaboration with Alessandrini that explores acoustic feedback through technological and instrumental interaction. Fusi plays the viola d'amore (VdA), a baroque instrument that can generate and control acoustic feedback through performance techniques. Working with Wave Field technology enhances the possibilities for feedback within and outside the VdA, blurring the distinction between virtual and physical sonic sources.

Choreographer Adam Weinert is in residence in EMPAC’s Concert Hall with five collaborators to develop and stage a new dance performance, ANTHEM, which dissects the national anthem and considers what it means to evolve beyond nostalgia for an America-that-never-was.

Conspiracy Influencer is a series of four newly-commissioned plays by Bailey Scieszka. Combining puppetry, clownery, multimedia elements, and live theater, the performance satirizes the ways in which the flow of information on the internet creates an often polarized, contentious political and social culture in the US. Featuring a madcap cast of characters including anthropomorphized consumer products, chaotic circus clowns, and Richard Nixon’s family pet, Conspiracy Influencer transcends its campy facade, inviting the audience to engage in a thoughtful meditation on the current state of collective consciousness in this country.

Scieszka will be in residence at EMPAC between May 2–13, 2022, during which time she will work closely with the EMPAC production team as well as guest curators Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Min Sun Jeon, and Guy Weltchek—all current students at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Utilizing many of the production facilities at EMPAC, Scieszka will develop set and lighting design, paint backdrops, edit sound and video, and rehearse Conspiracy Influencer within the two weeks of her residency, culminating in a performance for a live audience in EMPAC’s Theater.

Conspiracy Influencer will premiere for Rensselaer students, faculty, and staff in the theater on Friday, May 13th at 7PM and online on Thursday, May 26 at 7PM.

In 2019 Patricia Alessandrini was commissioned by Die Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik in Germany to compose a long-scale work with electronics for JACK quartet, which initiated the collaboration between composer and quartet.

In a further development of her practice of compositionally "interpreting" works from the past (reflected by the tongue-in-cheek reference to canonicity evoked in her title) Alessandrini incorporates a variety of works from the Western classical music canon into this piece. Using live electronics, materials from the recordings appear through the playing of the quartet.

Spatial distribution of the multi-channel electronic sounds in the performance space plays a key role in the melding and separation of the various works "interpreted" and interwoven with the playing of the live quartet. These spatial elements will be developed at EMPAC in addition to the real-time processing, concatenation and filtering techniques of the recordings.

After several postponements due to the pandemic, the work is now scheduled to be premièred at Die Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 2023. In the meantime, it will receive its first public pre-première by JACK quartet at Merkin Hall in New York City on 21 April, 2022 alongside works by Khyam Allami and George Lewis.

Bailey Scieszka’s Conspiracy Influencer is a four-part theatrical extravaganza premiering at EMPAC. This newly commissioned performance combines puppetry, clownery, and drag. It is set in a madcap world populated by characters like anthropomorphic Skittles, Nixon’s dead dog, a talking Comet pizza slice, a mob of Beanie Babies, and a demonic clown named Old Put (Scieszka’s alter ego). The cast of puppets satirize the wacky conspiracy theories that spawn in dark corners of the internet and contribute to the polarized socio-political landscape in the United States. Over the course of the performance follow Old Put’s meteoric rise from humble content creator, who unboxes dolls on Youtube, to celebrity influencer at the center of a disinformation campaign. The performance is the climax of Scieszka’s collaboration with curators from CCS Bard, EMPAC’s production team, and Philadelphia-based composer Joseph Hallman.

The play explores the ways in which history is remembered, resurrected, and sensationalized in America's entertainment-centered culture. The dense, absurdist, and hilarious dialogue in Conspiracy Influencer is steeped in the vocabulary of celebrity gossip, the internet, and social media. The characters reference ideas drawn from 24-hour blog and cable news outlets, cyclically mutated on the subcultural message boards of Reddit, 4chan, and Youtube’s comment sections. Scieszka critically alludes to fabulists who underwrite white American ideology in these forums, humorously and acerbically recasting the iconography of populism via Old Put and their puppet ensemble. Scieszka uses this divisive visual and verbal rhetoric as an emotional counterweight to her otherwise bright and playful imagery in a work that emasculates the trolls of the internet’s echo chambers. Laced with clever pop culture references and outlandish hijinks, this puppet show is a pointed meditation on the current state of collective consciousness in the United States.

Conspiracy Influencer is curated by Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Min Sun Jeon, and Guy Weltchek, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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Please join us for the online premiere of Conspiracy Influencer on May 26 at 7PM. 

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger presents a work-in-progress screening of his new multi-channel moving image work, followed by a discussion with curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley on the production and themes of the work.  

This work is part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, a project that incorporates artist-made regalia, props, videos, and performance, and explores alternative possible futures for sites of post-industrial extraction, reimaging them anew through speculative oral histories for the future. 

All aspects of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s installation have been produced in residence at EMPAC with Ginger Dunnill, their two children 'Io Kahoku and Tsesa, and project curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Yihsuan Chiu, Christine Nyce, and Gee Wesley.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) and streaming online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Centred around an audio play, a video installation, and material in vitrines, A Slightly Curving Place responds to the work of Umashankar Manthravadi, a self-taught acoustic archaeologist who has been listening to premodern performance spaces.

Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light is a ritualistic installation-performance of fragmented Renaissance polyphony, spatial audio, projections, and hanging brass instrument sculptures that creates ephemeral architectural spaces using overhead wave field synthesis and recordings of performance and improvisations by American Brass Quintet. The work is rooted in the legacy of the relationship between architecture and antiphonal music practices. 

“Wave Field Synthesis offers a unique opportunity to create aural architectures using audio holograms that you can explore, physically, without relying on the ‘sweet’ spot of many spatial audio systems. You can immerse yourself in an ephemeral, morphing, virtual architecture with the agency to sculpt your own experience and personal ritual.” 
—Nina C. Young

Nina C. Young began working with EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis system in early 2020. Her first sonic composition for EMPACwave, Phosphorescent Devotion (2021)—loosely inspired by the light and color combinations of James Turrell— premiered at TIME:SPANS festival and was recently presented at EMPAC for the Rensselaer campus community. Young’s works range from concert pieces to interactive installations that explore aural architectures, resonance, and ephemera. She dialogues with natural acoustic environments, instrumental performance techniques, and digital signal processing. Nina is a professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music. She was on the faculty of Rensselaer’s Department of the Arts from 2016–18. 

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This performance is being presented for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only at this time.