Continuing her work with EMPAC's Wave Field Synthesis Array, Nina C. Young will be in residence to develop and finalize her EMPAC-commissioned multimedia work. 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. The residency culminates in the premiere of a new work on April 21, 2022 in the theater.

Continuing her exploration into the sculptural potential of sound, Lesley Flanigan presents a performance for voice, speakers, electronic tone, and the resonance between.

This EMPAC-commission marks a shift in Flanigan’s approach to her work. Rather than performing live, her voice exists within a cluster of small wooden speakers that act as a choral ensemble staged in the center of the room. In contrast to this ensemble of speakers, large full-range loudspeakers are positioned in the four corners of Studio 2, wrapping the space in a moving wash of pure electronic tone. Inside the installation, the audience will experience a series of compositions that act as a meditation on how we listen, and on how that listening encounters electronic tone, the physical qualities of amplification, and the fragility of voice.

--

This performance is being presented for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only at this time. Attendance is limited so please register early.

Curator-in-residence Nida Ghouse is collaborating with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks on research towards their forthcoming exhibition Shifting Center, for which they are recipients of a Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Shifting Center will be presented at EMPAC in fall 2023 and considers the often-overlooked acoustic practices in contemporary art and exhibition-making as they relate to cultural memory, colonial history, and decolonial processes. More specifically, this curatorial research and the subsequent exhibition investigates the politics of sound by considering two opposing tendencies at play within contemporary art exhibitions and colonial museums: dislocation (objects, artworks, and cultural belongings taken from their original context and silenced through the mechanisms of museological preservation and display); and location (how architecture and acoustics impact the experience of exhibitions as resonant spaces of sited and situated listening). 

Curatorial research in preparation for the exhibition will span two years and will comprise international travel for studio and site visits, interviews, and archival research. The curators will meet with artists and specialists where they work as well as convene at EMPAC for discussions about acoustic display and spatial audio technology. This period of research is itself an exercise in listening to and learning from others, an essentially communal and temporal practice that is not only rooted in the present but looks for how past ways of knowing and practices of listening can inform an exhibition today. 

In this talk, artist Ni’Ja Whitson presents their work with Virtual Reality (VR) as it relates to the creation to their upcoming EMPAC production and performance of The Unarrival Experiments — Unconcealment Ceremonies. The project uses VR to center the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy through a Black, Queer, and Transembodied lens. To do so, Whitson is designing a performance space of “both/and”: both movement and stillness, both darkness and image, both engulfment and distancing, both listening and feeling. As an extension of Whitson’s design process, they will use this talk to propose new futures for VR with questions that beg to remain unanswered.

--

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.

In this concert the audience will walk through "wave fields." Wave Field Synthesis is a special way of creating sounds in space. The EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis system (EMPACwave) is a unique loudspeaker set-up with hundreds of speakers that was developed and built at Rensselaer over the past several years. While Wave Field Synthesis technology is not new, the design of EMPAC’s array is acknowledged by international experts to finally allow musicians to create music to the refined degree that has been promised by this theory of sound generation for over four decades.

Four works specifically composed for EMPACwave by Miya Masaoka, Bora Yoon, Nina Young, and Pamela Z premiered last August at Time:Spans festival but covid-protocol meant these new works could not presented at EMPAC concurrently. Concert in Wave Fields is now presented for our campus community to experience the potential of EMPACwave’s 200+ speakers through the music of four acclaimed American composers, none of which had previously had the opportunity to work with such an instrument.  

The composers Miya Masaoka, Bora Yoon, Nina Young, and Pamela Z created four very different pieces and their works inaugurate an ongoing program of commissions for EMPACwave at Rensselaer.

--

This concert is being presented in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. 

This work-in-progress performance is a culmination of two development residencies of 7NMS's multi-year live performance project, PROPHET. The project's residencies at EMPAC explores spatial audio, mobile set elements, and moving-image content. 

Black Body Amnesia is a performance project by author, performance artist, educator, and curator Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. The project accompanies Kosoko’s forthcoming Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts (Wendy Subway, 2022), which blends poetry, memoir, conversation, and performance theory to enliven a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, Kosoko’s archive refracts the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people within the American context to tell a complex narrative rooted within a queer, Black, self-defined, and feminist imagination.

Now, Kosoko brings their work to the stage for a live performance melding vocalization, music, spoken word, movement, moving-image, sculpture, and fabric. Black Body Amnesia is performed by Kosoko with an alternating cast of musicians, DJ’s, and vocalists including Raymond Pinto, DJ Maij, and sound designer/composer Everett Saunders. For the work, Kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a choreographic device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure. 

The performance of Black Body Amnesia follows Kosoko’s remote day long April 22, 2020 EMPAC presentation titled Chameleon (The Living Installments), which repurposed the online social platform Discord as an interactive venue where the artist hosted audio streaming of original sound, footage from a new moving-image work, a multi-media zine, remote conversations, a somatic workshop, and an archive of images, videos, and links. Many of the theories and documents from this event will find themselves in Black Body Amnesia, now staged in person for deeper theatrical exploration. 

Kosoko and their team will be in-residence at EMPAC to develop and rehearse Black Body Amnesia in advance of their performance. This residency will support lighting design and set design, and will include a film shoot. The performance of the work will be open to Rensselaer faculty, staff, and students, and will be staged for a dynamic film shoot that will be streamed at a later date.

Black Body Amnesia is a performance project by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people within the American context.

Kosoko and their team will be in-residence February 7–18, 2022 to develop and rehearse Black Body Amnesia in advance of the premiere performance on February 18. This will be Kosoko’s fourth EMPAC residency. It will support lighting design and set design. The collaborators will also use the residency for a film shoot to create moving-image content for Kosoko’s live performance.

Black Body Amnesia will premiere for Rensselaer students, faculty, and staff in the Theater on Friday, February 18 at 3PM.

7NMS is at EMPAC for the first of two ten-day development residencies that will culminate in a performance of the company's multi-year live performance project, PROPHET, in fall 2022. For this first residency, the company will explore spatial audio, mobile set elements, and moving-image content for their project.