A ubiquitous fixture in DJ and electronic music for the better half of the last century, the record turntable has been utilized as an instrument in innumerable ways since its conception. Experimental musicians Victoria Shen and Mariam Rezaei explore and push the musical limits of turntablism in a thrilling and dizzying concert performance of new music for unorthodox instruments and objects where DIY sensibilities meet the audio technological capabilities of EMPAC's Studio 1. Extreme sonic textures and physical gesture substitute for traditional musical elements like melody and harmony, questioning commonly accepted modes of music and meaning making.

Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco, whose sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body.

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist, and performer. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE, and TUSK NORTH. Rezaei’s acclaimed music has been described as “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian) that “harness[es] extreme technical prowess” (Boomkat).

In this program with video and performance artist Claudia Pagès Rabal, the artist shares various facets of her artistic research. Pagès’s past works have often engaged with palimpsests in which informal, vernacular languages and customs are at cross-purposes with official operations and the semantics of power.

Her recent work often swerves from intriguing cultural symbols to the raw material structures that underlie them and back to the unstable substance of language. A recent work Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe at SculptureCenter New York focused on a Moorish cistern successively rebuilt across many centuries, such that each architectural update coincided with new forms of displacement and cultural erasure. Through performance, video, and sculptural installation with a custom-made LED screen she fabricated, Pagès and her collaborators move through the graffiti in the cistern. The marks on its walls become a kind of found score that enlivens a complex flow of economic exchange and evolving cultural systems.

Pagès’s work often occupies what the artist refers to as the gerund: a space of language and movement that is detached from any particular subject.

Circulating, administering, grouping, and ungrouping—Pagès’s projects explore how discrete actions turn into endless tracings of motion and generate new forms of power. Pagès is particularly interested in the cultural life of logistics, often focusing on patterns of trade as they are reflected in material culture.

For this event, artist Jewyo Rhii is in conversation with curator Katherine C. M. Adams to discuss her artistic practice. Jewyo Rhii’s work engages with the long afterlife of artistic labor and builds public links to patterns of transit, movement, and storage we rarely see.

Her practice often bears the mark of itinerancy, reflecting on the experience of passing through places where one cannot stay and making meaning out of encounters with transient situations. Love Your Depot (2019– ) is a large sculptural installation using principles of storage to activate a workspace for younger artists; Night Studio (2009–2011) developed through turning Rhii’s studio space into an open house; and the exhibition Of a Hundred Carts and On (2023) activated art storage systems to give a shifting tableaux of works new meanings through their mobile, expandable installation. As Rhii interrupts objects on their way to being stored, shipped off, filed away, or compartmentalized, she affirms material culture in its moments of incompleteness. By engaging with states of personal and material precarity, and casting artwork in relation to the (im)possiblity of its preservation, Rhii allows us to see how ephemeral structures in our lives build their own stories—and hold ours together.

In this program, Rhii speaks in particular about how her work uses sculptural machines and architectural storage processes to create new possibilities for collective storytelling. The event will also touch on the collaborative facets of Rhii’s practice, which often directs itself to local communities and artist groups.

This event requires everyone to wear a mask in the venue.⁣ Masks will be available on entry.⁣

Multi-instrumentalist composer and electronic music historian Tara Rodgers produces a retrospective concert of selected works from the past 20 years, diffused in an immersive 4.1 sound system.

Rodgers’s research and music explore electronic sound as material and metaphor, with studio practice as a hands-on parallel to study of the long history of electronic music and sound. Her music is described as combining “rigor and reverence... bold in the precision and subtlety it takes to mix such signals with thrill and grace and restraint” (NPR Music), “carrying her listeners along through deeply felt, deeply connected sonic energy that embodies joy, transcendence, and positivity” (Routledge).

The concert juxtaposes her wide-ranging work across styles and methods, from generative computer music written in SuperCollider, to electroacoustic compositions featuring piano improvisation, to pulsing ambient and techno tracks.

As a historian and multidisciplinary scholar, Rodgers has also published essays in foundational volumes in contemporary studies of music, sound, technology, and culture. Her book Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke University Press, 2010) brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures who expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noise-making.

After the concert, Rodgers is joined by Rensselaer Arts graduate student and renowned DJ Rekha Malhotra, along with Director of the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Stephanie Loveless for an onstage conversation and Q&A.

P. Staff shares their current work in Flesh/Flash: Scanning as Moving Image, a screening and open conversation at the culmination of their EMPAC residency. The artist’s recent research is exploring the act of scanning—as an image practice, as a mechanism of power and surveillance, and as a monitoring of bodily states.

Scanning’s capacity to produce moving images without standard film techniques is tied to its ability to orchestrate the body politic—probing the insides of things, organic as well as social. But what sort of data does this generate, really?

What is the spatial awareness that emerges from externalizing insides of various kinds, and how do imaging tools suggestive of clinical assessments generate something playful, or sinister? P. Staff explores how scanning opens us up, reflecting on the nature of carceral, disciplinary systems at work in them—but also on their potential for productive disorientation, as they pull us away from the body’s surface and open towards a queer, non-normative subjectivity.

This program features recent short films by the artist and provides a window into their current work. At EMPAC, Staff is deploying thermal cameras, Lidar, and audio techniques that register figures through non-imagistic footprints.

In conversation with project curator Katherine C. M. Adams, Staff considers how the scan forges a different sort of political aesthetics than the traditional passage of light through a filmic aperture. Their conversation is framed by a brief presentation of films and an attempt at a discursive performance of scanning the scan—exploring the stakes of taking a sensory X-ray of a locale’s subjects, and offering annotations of the techniques in Staff’s past and present work.

Featured Works

• La Nuit Américaine (2023)
• HEVN (2021)
• On Venus (2019)
• Weed Killer (2017)

Soaring trumpet lines transform into haunting, guttural subtones. Resonant vibraphone ferocity hovers over basslines that throb and sear. Torrential drumming pushes toward episodes of improvisatory sonic exploration that is languid at times, boisterous and frenetic at others.

In a concert performance, trumpet player and composer Peter Evans leads the quartet Being & Becoming. Featuring some of the most forward-thinking young musicians in Jazz and Contemporary music, each of the members of Being & Becoming are widely known for their individuality, virtuosity, and deep musical curiosity and rigor.

The quartet features Evans on trumpet, vibraphonist and synth player Joel Ross, bassist and bass synth player Nick Joz, and drummer Adriel Vincent-Brown. The dynamic and charged lighting design of Azumi O E heightens the alchemic creation and recreation of musical worlds onstage.

Evans' compositions for the band draw from a wide variety of sources, traditional and experimental, with a grounding in improvisational idioms, notated concert music, and an array of experimental approaches. The group has released two albums–their eponymous debut in 2020 and the symphonic work Ars Memoria in 2022, both on Evans’s label More is More.

The last two years have seen the group tour major festivals and venues in the USA and Europe, constantly developing new music. A new album recorded in 2024 at the legendary Rudy Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey will see its release in 2025. All four members are recognized as leading virtuosi on their respective instruments, and have thriving careers as soloists, bandleaders, producers, and composers.

This event is currently at capacity. Please arrive at the EMPAC box office on Level 7 30 minutes before the scheduled start time to be put on a waiting list for possible standby entry. Thank you. —The EMPAC Team

Korakrit Arunanondchai explores what the artist calls the ghost layer of images in this work-in-progress. Arunanondchai turns the Studio 1—Goodman venue into an atmospheric environment in which viewers are absorbed by cinematic gestures and proto-human forms. Footage moves in and out of visual clarity as images coalesce on clouds of fog and disperse into air. The program is in collaboration with Alex Gvojic, Aaron David Ross, and Michael Beharie.

The screening scenario also includes performance collaborators that emerge from and disappear into patches of darkness. Towards and away from legible figures, the audience experiences the dissolution of traditional film into pure atmosphere.

Arunanondchai’s artistic practice plumbs the depth of ritual, from everyday practices of cinema-going, to traditional spirituality in Southeast Asia, to the obsessive process of art-making itself. Past performances have taken elemental materials—heat, water—to dramatize the possession of spaces by their historical and sensorial ghosts.

For this work, possession is central—the overtaking of the artist by the work, the viewer by the image, the body by its environment. Arunanondchai’s project at EMPAC also draws on generative artificial intelligence to image chimeric, in-between forms that imagine speculative genealogies and formal affinities between different sorts of subjects, then re-projected as moving images. As he explores parallel, overlapping rhythms of East and West histories, Arnunanondchai’s work offers a vision of history as a sort of collective cinema that carries its own ghosts as it conjures new presents.

In this program, Critical Intimacies: Feminist Imaginative Technologies, artist and filmmaker Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, together with writer and film/performance researcher Katie Kirkland, offer an experimental lecture through dialogue and the exchange of films and texts.

Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland explore the feminine and anti-colonial gaze across performance, video, and cinema. How can we practice critical intimacy within the realm of art, cinema, and theory, i.e. how can we de-construct and construct simultaneously? How can we transform tools of oppression into tools of liberation?

Focusing on feminist forms of resistance and re-enactment, kinship and transmission, Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland center on female artists and theorists with ancestry from East and Southeast Asia whose work grapples with legacies of Western imperialism.

As they discuss specific artistic and theoretical works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and others, they consider the use of hybridity to resist epistemic violence, cultivate self-reflexivity, and build critical intimacy.

Through this program, Nguyen-Chi also explores approaches and themes relevant to her work on the forthcoming film project Letter to the Father (working title), which will be co-produced by EMPAC.

Dramatis Personae is a combined film and talk program that takes inspiration from theatermaker and choreographer Jack Ferver’s practice, giving audiences the chance to engage with ideas and techniques relevant to their work and new commission. The program frames a live reading by the artist of a section of their in-progress work My Town, co-commissioned by EMPAC and NYU Skirball.

Dramatis Personae addresses the performance of self and includes a brief selection of short films and excerpts, including Nowhere Apparent, a short film by Jeremy Jacob starring Ferver, who also created the script and choreography. Other featured filmmakers: Skip Blumberg, Ken Kobland, and David Wojnarowicz with Jesse Hultberg.

Ferver’s work engages with queer performance, the fabrication of personas, and what the artist has called auto-mythology. As a choreographer, Ferver has been influenced by the work of Martha Graham, a pioneer of modern dance, characteristic of sweeping, expressive movements and a vivid relationship to power and vulnerability. Ferver’s choreography works in tandem with their script, which moves through psychological iconography.

Ferver’s theatrical influences have ranged from absurdist theatermakers like the French playwright Jean Genet, to performance in pop culture. Their theatrical work has also often been placed in dialogue with the legacy of camp, a minor genre of performance associated with a self-consciously exaggerated and artificial style.

Ferver knowingly takes up this style in a way that pushes it into new registers of embodiment and self-narration. Considering camp as one of the many ways of playing a role, Dramatis Personae also engages with the ways we are haunted by and re-perform personal and collective archetypes.

Who is the Rhythmanalyst and what is his laboratory? Following on his spring 2023 project Speakers That Speak to You, artist DeForrest Brown Jr. returns to EMPAC to ask: what comes after techno? How do we imagine new models of the music studio and of distribution, and how might these feed back into ways of capturing and assessing the sonic profile of technology today? This program offers a demo and preview of Brown’s new project, Rhythmanalytics, intended to culminate in a new album as well as a book.

Rhythmanalytics finds sound tunneling through space, through the ear, and then linking back to larger infrastructures of post-digital futures. Using the studio space as a meta-instrument, Brown explores non-repetitive rhythms and tonal shifts, probing rhythm as both techno’s primary means and as a way of calibrating the material conditions of production and logistics.

In addition to a live listening session offered during the event, Brown joins music scholar Louis Chude-Sokei in conversation to explore questions raised by Brown’s new project and their shared interests around Black culture, music technology, and discourses of Afrofuturism and posthumanism. A key question in Brown’s new project is sonic compression: of live performance into recording, of dimensional sound into a file, acoustic into digital matter.