Please join us for an evening of films and conversation with artist Ayo Akingbade.

Akingbade’s enigmatic and vividly-rendered films deconstruct systems of power with a singularly candid and genre-defying approach. Including a selection of Akingbade’s short films from the last seven years produced in the UK, Nigeria, and the US, this event foregrounds works that are exemplary of her autobiographical style. Shown together, they eloquently weave personal memory with communal history, longing with familiarity, the quotidian with the magical in an intimate program grounded in the specific rhythms of place.

Based in London, Akingbade’s award-winning films are presented world-wide, including at Cannes Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, and the Chisenhale Gallery, London.

Tonight's performance of A Kind of Ache begins at 7PM.

“What would it feel like to be the majority?”

A Kind of Ache is a multimedia installation and concert from composer Sarah Hennies, sculptor and conceptual artist Terry Berlier, and electroacoustic duo The Living Earth Show that reimagines a world designed from and for a queer identity.

The drums-and-guitar duo will play on Berlier’s sculptures alongside Hennies, using objects, music, and their imaginations to wonder “What would it feel like to be the majority?”

The Living Earth Show–guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson–is a megaphone and canvas for the world’s most progressive artists, seeking to push the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded. This performance marks the beginning of a multi-season residency for The Living Earth Show at EMPAC, offering engaging and exciting large-scale work from artists with whom they work closely.

Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were the waves) is an electro-acoustic performance and installation for EMPAC’s Concert Hall by Venezuelan-Ecuadorian artist Ana Navas and Venezuelan composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares. It is performed by American percussionists Taylor Long, Robert Cosgrove, and Clara Warnaar on an array of playful instrument-sculptures by Navas, which fuse iconic motifs of 20th century modernism with traditional boat-building tools and techniques.

Cuando las nubes eran las olas is an expansive work of visual art and music inspired by the Aula Magna, the Central University of Venezuela’s auditorium, and the artworks commissioned for the campus by Venezulan, European, and American modernists by its architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the early 1950s. The Aula Magna houses Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling (1953), known locally as “nubes” (clouds). It is the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall to reflect optimal acoustics. This feature resonates with EMPAC’s Concert Hall, which houses the first fabric ceiling to span the full-length of the hall to shape the sound.

Deeply embedded in the afterlives of iconic modernist artworks, Navas’ sculptures, installations, and performances trace the use and misuse of such works over time as they are circulated as reproductions and appropriated away from the site and context of their original making. For Cuando las nubes eran las olas, Navas’ sculptural instruments, costumes, and scenography and Escalona-Mijares’ multi-layered approach to electro-acoustic composition interweaves the architectural properties of the Aula Magna with its thick social and sonic history in an exploration of the relationship between sculpture, acoustics, and space.

After her EMPAC debut with the solo work Serpentine in December 2022, Canadian choreographer Daina Ashbee returns to Troy, NY for the US premiere of the artist’s first ensemble work.

J’ai pleuré avec les chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction) is a live performance saturated with the incisive, sober precision and poetics of explosion and trance that we recognize as Ashbee’s choreographic signature. Between the growling, yelps, tears, and calls from its staged human pack, Ashbee offers EMPAC audiences an evening to observe human bodies in acts of leading and following, piling on all fours, and passing through trance-like states as we consider pain, tenderness, and sensory experiences without narrative boundaries.

The Latin adverb sic is used in brackets to identify an intentional “error” when quoting someone, emphasizing the “wrongness” of someone’s speech in a standard English narrative. For Will Rawls, [sic] is a useful metaphor for how the language and gestures of black bodies are captured, quoted or misquoted, and circulated to appear strange in various media. Through stop-motion animation and a live performance, [siccer] challenges the limits of citation while exploring the meaningful strangeness found at the edges of sense.

Presented by UnionDocs in partnership with EMPAC at Rensselaer, join us for an evening of films by UNDO Fellows Deborah Stratman, TJ Cuthand, Miryam Charles, and Crystal Z. Campbell.

The program begins with a preview of Deborah Stratman’s new film, Last Things, which traces evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. Last Things is followed by two works by TJ Cuthand, including Lost Art of the Future (2022) in which Cuthand talks about artists he has known who have passed while living with HIV/AIDS, and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer. Miryam Charles’s Cette Maison (2022) follows its protagonist Tessa into a future that did not happen, while in Crystal Z Campbell’s A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse (2017-2020) an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.

Break ꩜ut is a symposium (of sorts) that celebrates the research, writing and filmmaking of artists and writers who seek to break out of the patterns and preconceptions that dominate the documentary form. Ashon Crawley and Crystal Z Campbell, Lakshmi Padmanabhan and Miryam Charles, Jas Morgan and TJ Cuthand, and Sukhdev Sandhu and Deborah Stratman lead a series of public dialogues and screenings developed during The UNDO Fellowship over the course of two days.

The UNDO Fellowship is a yearly program that pairs four artist filmmakers with four writers to each propose a research topic inspired by the artist’s practice. Having stewed on these thorny questions in regular dialogue with the whole group of fellows over the year, the participants subsequently invite more voices to weigh in, add context, and bring new challenges to the conversation, resulting in the publication of a new volume of commissioned texts.

EMPAC building tours are offered throughout the fall season. In September, a curatorial tour with Vic Brooks will be led in conjunction with the matinee performance of Only Breath, Words by Anna Craycroft. In October and November, technology tours will be led by Senior Network Administrator Dave Bebb, and Video Engineer Ryan Jenkins.

Visitors should meet at the box office.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 AT 12PM WITH SENIOR CURATOR VIC BROOKS

Join Vic Brooks for a behind-the-scenes look at EMPAC’s production facilities. Brooks will discuss the acoustic and visual potential of each EMPAC venue for the making of complex artworks, including a tour of Anna Craycroft’s installation Only Breath, Words, which will be performed at 2PM following the tour.

SATURDAY OCTOBER 8 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.

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 5 AT 12PM WITH VIDEO ENGINEER RYAN JENKINS

Join Ryan Jenkins for a backstage tour from a visual technologies perspective. From 3D film productions to green-screen animations, flying cameras, and panoramic projection environments, EMPAC is a lush visual world. This tour focuses on EMPAC as a film-production facility and high-resolution screening venue.

Presented by UnionDocs in partnership with EMPAC at Rensselaer, Break ꩜ut is a symposium (of sorts) that celebrates the research, writing, and filmmaking of artists and writers who seek to break out of the patterns and preconceptions that dominate the documentary form. Ashon Crawley and Crystal Z Campbell, Lakshmi Padmanabhan and Miryam Charles, Jas Morgan and TJ Cuthand, and Sukhdev Sandhu and Deborah Stratman lead a series of public dialogues and screenings developed during the UNDO Fellowship. 

The UNDO Fellowship is a yearly program that pairs four artist filmmakers with four writers to each propose a research topic inspired by the artist’s practice. Having stewed on these thorny questions in regular dialogue with the whole group of fellows over the year, the participants subsequently invite more voices to weigh in, add context, and bring new challenges to the conversation, resulting in the publication of a new volume of commissioned texts.  

We invite you to join us as the first readers, and to come together for a two-day series of screenings and conversations that celebrate and dive into this collaborative research.

In Site of Whispers, writer Ashon Crawley and artist Crystal Z Campbell examine the various ways that ideas, stories, and narratives are collected and ask what happens when the things collected are ephemeral. In Forms of Errantry, scholar Lakshmi Padmanabhan and filmmaker Miryam Charles ask how the form of experimental documentary can address the legacies of colonization as they are lived today. Exploring Kinship is a Technology, writer and critic Jas Morgan and filmmaker / artist TJ Cuthand propose to advance Two-Spirit Indigiqueer life cycles through forms of mutual recognition, contemporary kinship, and world-building. And in Geologic Listening author Sukhdev Sandhu and filmmaker Deborah Stratman probe critical debates around the Anthropocene, monumentality, and the politics of audibility through an inquiry that looks to geology as an experimental pedagogy, an archive from which to ponder the ways in which our society dwells between past and future catastrophes.

After 20 years as Founding Director of EMPAC, an invitation to a final Goodbye Hello from Johannes Goebel. This 60-minute reading can be experienced as a shower of words. The stream of sentences and the droplets of words will make the underpinnings of EMPAC’s building and program shimmer.

Johannes joined Rensselaer at the beginning of EMPAC's design process to ensure the architects and consultants would meet the vision of the building as an optimal bridge between the physical world of human experience and interaction and the potential of the digital domain. Parallel to the design and construction of the new building, he developed the program of EMPAC by establishing the technical, curatorial, and operational teams, and initializing the artistic and research productions, residencies, and events. Between 1990 and 2002, Goebel served as founding director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. 

Please join us for a reception after the reading to say Hello and Goodbye to our director Johannes Goebel. Refreshments will be served.

Composer and artist Miya Masaoka will premiere a new piece written specifically for EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array and present a talk on recent research and work in spatial audio composition.

Inspired by the three-dimensional and perspectival painting techniques developed by artists during the 15th-century Italian Renaissance, in her new project, Masaoka seeks to draw parallels between those revolutionary conceptions of space with the current possibilities for sonic spatiality in the 21st-century.

Masaoka has been working with early systems of hardware and software of spatialization including ADAT, C Software, and acoustic strategies including choirs, ensembles, and the BBC Scottish Orchestra in a spatial context. An award-winning composer, she has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Luciano Berio Rome Prize in Musical Composition, the Fulbright among many others. She is a Professor at Columbia University and directs the MFA program in Sound, a hybrid program with the Computer Music Center and Visual Arts. In the photograph above, Masaoka is shown with a Dan Bau, and she sometimes references the monochord as a clear and physical representation of the spectral harmonic relationships of intervals and natural tuning systems.

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.