EMPAC building tours are offered throughout the fall season. In October, a curatorial tour led by Vic Brooks and a director’s tour with Johannes Goebel; in November, a not-to-miss network/IT tour with network admin Dave Bebb and a video-focused technology tour will be led by video engineer Ryan Jenkins.

Visitors should meet outside in front of the East (campus) entrance at 1:45PM.

OCTOBER 6 at 2PM with Senior Curator Vic Brooks

Join EMPAC's Time-Based Visual Art senior curator Vic Brooks for a behind-the-scenes look at EMPAC’s extraordinary production facilities. From precisely calibrated studios, to a concert hall on springs, the tour will delve into the acoustic and visual potential of EMPAC’s venues for the making of complex artworks, along with their approach to the connection of EMPAC’s artists and audiences.

OCTOBER 20 at 2PM with Director Johannes Goebel

Join EMPAC’s founding director Johannes Goebel for a tour of the building (and overview of the program) that he helped realize and has led through EMPAC’s first 13 years. Goebel will take visitors through the EMPAC building with an eye and an ear to the “human-scale” functions he strove to achieve in taking the project from a lofty vision to one of the world’s most advanced media centers.

NOVEMBER 3 at 2PM with Senior Network Administrator Dave Bebb

Join senior network admin Dave Bebb for a tour offering a look at the center from an information technology perspective. With miles of fiber optic cable linking all four venues as well as the audio and video recording facilities, EMPAC is an environment where physical and digital worlds seamlessly intersect.

NOVEMBER 17 at 2PM with Video Engineer Ryan Jenkins

From 3D film productions to green-screen animations, flying cameras, and panoramic projection environments, EMPAC is a lush visual world, and video engineer Ryan Jenkins is at the center of it on a daily basis. This tour focuses on EMPAC as a film production facility and high-resolution screening venue.

All Tours are at 2PM.

Note: Tours have a VERY LIMITED capacity and are for campus faculty, staff, and students only at this time. If you are interested in bringing a class or scheduling a specific tour for your campus group, please contact the box office and we will get you sorted. 

Poet, curator, and artist Anaïs Duplan is in residence to produce Blackspace, a new series of radio broadcasts commissioned by EMPAC to be presented in collaboration with WRPI and Montez Press Radio in November 2021. 

Each episode narrated by Duplan is inspired by music and artworks that seek to “pursue liberatory possibility” and entwine lyric poetry, criticism, music, and field recordings. Based on his recent book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, the broadcasts similarly employ vivid description of the action of artworks—or ekphrastic technique—to explore the aesthetic strategies employed by artists of color working with digital technologies since the 1960s.

Cannupa Hanska Luger will be in residence at EMPAC to work on the post-production and installation design of a new multi-channel moving image work. Cannupa Hanska Luger is in residence with Ginger Dunhill, their two children 'Io Kahoku and Tsesa, and curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley. 

This residency follows the principal filming of this new work in various public locations around Troy, NY that took place in September 2021. This footage will subsequently be combined with footage recently shot in collaboration with Gabe Fermin in the White Sands desert.

Part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, this project 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. 

A work-in-progress presentation of the installation and a conversation between Cannupa Haska Luger and curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley will take place at EMPAC on April 7, 2022. 

The project is curated by Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Yihsuan Chiu, Christine Nyce, and Gee Wesley, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. 

Future Ancestral Technologies

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a science fiction. Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and help to imagine the future on a global scale. Future Ancestral Technologies does this from an Indigenous lens; it articulates a future narrative in which migration of humans is essential for survival on and with the land and water and people of color are the primary characters. As the future of our planet is threatened by capitalism’s continued devastation, new strategies of survivance are needed. With global instability, widespread financial crisis and unaffordable housing, our lifestyles must change. Future Ancestral Technologies is an ongoing investigation of our past in order to move forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking. This work prepares us for a highly adaptable lifestyle that lives with the land, not off the land. Future Ancestral Technologies prototypes designs for objects and their use, tests ritual and conducts ceremony. Future Ancestral Technologies is a deep time space of futuristic vision in which societies live true reverence and acknowledgement of land, beyond the trappings of cultural production, to dream and test a culture of fundamental coexistence.

Future Ancestral Technologies is an approach to making art objects, videos, and performance with the intent to influence global consciousness. This Indigenous-centered science fiction uses creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, this methodology conjures innovative life-based solutions that promote a thriving Indigeneity. 

This Indigenous science fiction is characterized by unique objects, futuristic narratives, ancient myths, new paradigms and symbiotic landscapes. The ongoing narrative developed by installation and land based work articulates a future in which Indigenous people harness technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a methodology, a practice, a way of futurism, that suggests a radical approach to materials and their use. 

Using art practice to adopt science fiction, Future Ancestral Technologies is a context for imagining the distant future and dreaming sustainable approaches to the lived experiences of the generations to come. Using traditional craft and skill sets to create futuristic potential, the process imagines, enacts and prototypes experiences and technologies that promote Indigenous cultures to thrive into the future. Future Ancestral Technologies is disseminated through art and internet venues to influence global collective consciousness. Future Ancestral Technologies challenges and empowers humans—from individuals to industries—to visualize an Indigenous future and to practice empathy, ritual, and resourcefulness in epochs to come.

From August 12–16, three EMPAC commissions made for Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) premiered at the 2021 TIME:SPANS Festival in NYC where EMPAC audio staff were on hand for engineering and technical support. The Wave Field Synthesis system allows the artists to place sounds in space in a unique way for both composers and listeners.

The following compositions premiered at the 2021 TIME:SPANS Festival:

Miya Masaoka
Seeking a Sense of Somethingness (Out of Nothingness), 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Bora Yoon
SPKR SPRKL, 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Nina C. Young
New Work, 2021
Commissioned by The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust

Pamela Z
SONANT TOPOGRAPHY, 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Concert duration: 70 min

Please join us for a presentation by American artist Tony Cokes. 

Through a rigorous analysis of images and language, Tony Cokes dissects the often-obscured power dynamics at work in the cultural and political representation of histories of Blackness, class, and the war on terror. 

Cokes’ distinctive artworks and installations center on videos that foreground textual statements, often overlaid onto colorful monochromatic backgrounds with pop, punk, and electronic music soundtracks. Quoting language from across the political spectrum—from philosophical statements to news, art criticism, advertising, and song lyrics—Cokes mixes linguistic, visual, and sonic oppositions in a pared back approach that refuses the easy desire for a spectacular image. Shot through with wry humor and the aesthetics and upbeat music of popular culture, the videos project unstable meanings that deconstruct how we receive and read images.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.

—

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.

It is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that we are learning, speaking and gathering on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people who are the Indigenous peoples of this land. Despite tremendous hardship in being forced from here, today their community resides in Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all.

Decolonizing Language is an ongoing series of conversations with artists and cultural practitioners whose works center Indigenous languages and seek to destabilize linguistic hierarchies.

The series approaches questions around Indigenous language revitalization and the potential of art, poetry, film, performance, and music to articulate suppressed narratives and histories from ecological, social, and artistic perspectives. 

Please join us for this online event featuring the artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka in conversation with curator Mariana Fernández. 

Over the past decade, Hopinka’s videos and films have been animated by an exploration of language as a way to formulate questions of identity and belonging. Hopinka’s filmmaking career began around the same time he started learning Chinuk Wawa, an almost extinct creole trade-language spoken in the Pacific Northwest, and Hočąk, the endangered, Indigenous language of the Ho-Chunk peoples. His works often overlay English, Chinuk Wawa, and Hočąk to move beyond static ideas about language and cultural identity. 

As the third in EMPAC’s Decolonizing Language series of conversations seeking to destabilize linguistic hierarchies and present strategies of Indigenous language revitalization, Hopinka will discuss his use of language in crafting alternative understandings of place, community, and knowledge transmission.

Break @ut is a symposium (of sorts) that celebrates the research, writing, and filmmaking initiated during THE UNDO FELLOWSHIP and presented by our partners UnionDocs: Center for Documentary Art. Four ambitious research topics will be explored through a set of online screenings, study groups, and public dialogues. We are excited to share the ideas resulting from the inaugural year of this endeavor. 

Five artists — all extremely different in their curiosities, aesthetics, methods, and personalities, but more or less aligned in their efforts to break out of the patterns and preconceptions that dominate the documentary form — paired up with four intellectually adventurous writers. Together they proposed a research topic inspired by the artist’s practice. Having stewed on these thorny questions in regular dialogue with the whole group of brilliant fellows, their drafts now seek readers.

So, Break @ut with UnionDocs! Choose a single thread of inquiry, or weave connections between them all. Tune into the stream to watch and listen in, or sign up for an UNDO STUDY GROUP to get the reader and join a rigorous and creative discussion.

Please join us for a talk by the director Lisa Rovner and producer Marcus Werner Hed of Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines, an award-winning documentary that maps the history of twentieth century women experimental music pioneers. 

Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors features the work of visionary composer and Rensselaer professor Pauline Oliveros alongside Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, EMPAC-alum Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel. Through rigorous research, interviews, and archival footage, the film follows the electronic music composers’ radical experimentations with machines that redefined the boundaries of contemporary music.

The talk will include an educational screening of the film in Zoom. Students, staff, and faculty at Rensselaer were able to access the film throughout the semester. 

Sisters with Transistors opened at Metrograph on April 23, 2021.