Kite’s artistic practice draws from Indigenous Lakȟóta ontologies to consider the possibility of kindred collaboration with technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this engagement, the artist centers the concept of the “visual score,” a form of experimental music notation that contains symbolic forms for performers to read and interpret.

Open Rehearsal—December 5

Performance artist, visual artist, and composer Kite engages with Rensselaer student musicians in a workshop for dream scores. Audience members are invited to observe an open rehearsal as Kite leads the student ensemble in her artistic practice, discussing the musical potentials of experimental notations/scores when interpreted and embodied through sound. Attendees will also observe as Kite leads students through building scores using their own visual language, drawing on personal references and dreams.

Performance—December 6

Kite’s performances often use custom-made interfaces that bring the body into contact with the machine—such as a Machine Learning hair-braid interface—to address ethical ways of being in relation with the non-human. Kite derived this performance’s graphic notation as a score from the geometric shapes and symbols of traditional Lakȟóta quillwork and beadwork, as well as shapes and symbols that appear in dreams. The performance is followed by a discussion and Q&A session with the audience.

Award-winning composer and visual artist Raven Chacon gives a talk on his recent work, which explores the sonic, visual, and thematic elements of his experimental practice.

Chacon’s work threads its way through sound, video, scores, sculpture, and performance to engage with the land and its inhabitants, and to address topics of Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice. His compositions include orchestral instruments and instrumentalize found objects, as in his American Ledger No. 1 (2018), a large graphic score displayed as a flag which traces the history of settler colonialism in the United States. His piece Voiceless Mass (2021), for which Chacon won a Pulitzer Prize, is a work for organ and ensemble which reflects upon the relationship between the Christian church and Indigenous populations. A mass without voices, the composition gives musical form to the silencing of Indigenous expression and language, and the impossibility of their recovery.

Chacon also introduces a new EMPAC-commissioned project with San Francisco-based experimental music duo The Living Earth Show, which is being developed over the next year and includes artists and musicians based in New York’s Hudson Valley and Capital Region.

This residency continues and expands Chacon’s musical collaboration with The Living Earth Show as a follow-up to Tremble Staves, an outdoor collaborative performance with professional and student performers, which premiered at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco in 2019. Exploring issues around water usage, access, and rights, Tremble Staves was developed in collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Art in the Parks Program in San Francisco.

All are invited to stay for a reception, following the talk.

As part of the Ephemeral Organ series, new media artist SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY culminates her EMPAC residency with an artist talk exploring her overall practice and demonstrating interactive cuing technology she is developing for her latest multimedia performance projects. In this event, HOLLOWAY investigates the mutual possibilities of technology and the body to track, mediate, and generate elements of a theatrical experience.

Known for her experiments with noisy, electronic sculpture and her unique approach to expanded cinema, HOLLOWAY shapes the grammars of computer programming and sadomasochism into tools for exposing structures and narratives of power. Her two current projects in development reimagine familiar narratives through a Black queer lens, and an aesthetic approach driven by the digital age. [WALLED GARDENS ] _or_ return(ing) "a love in disguise as forever.” is based on the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale; and THEY LAID DOWN THEIR HAMMERS AND CRIED is based on the John Henry folk tale.

Both projects use technologies that allow the performers’ gestures to generate and interface with lights, sound synthesis, sculptural elements, and video. These responsive, interactive designs are inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s piece, Open Score (1966), which stages a game of tennis that uses reactive engineering to choreograph light and sound through physical motion. HOLLOWAY presents a similar live interaction between technology, theatrical staging, and bodily action. Here, she applies machine learning algorithms as decision-making mechanisms to produce the landscape of each piece in the moment

As Curator-in-Residence, Theater and Dance, Tara Aisha Willis provides context for the Ephemeral Organ series and discusses her forthcoming book projects and past curatorial work. Ephemeral Organ culminates in April 2025 and brings together residencies, performances, and talks by several artists whose work explores choreography and the body in motion as a technology for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience.

Willis’s body of research explores the lineages and practices of Black experimentation and improvisation in dance through contemporary performances. To do so, she uses dance historical context, frameworks from Black studies and performance theory, and explorations embedded in her creative practices as curator and dancer. In part, her work grapples with the archival capacities of the dancing body and with how movement emerges within the process of generating archival research.

Her scholarly book in development, Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness, points to the intricacy and changeability of both dance and race in performances by choreographers Bebe Miller, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Ralph Lemon, as well as Will Rawls: one for which Willis served as curator and the other in which she performed. A more experimental book project in collaboration with writer Jaime Shearn Coan and artist taisha paggett challenges conventional modes of writing and archiving dance practices across paggett’s body of performance work (forthcoming from Soberscove Press).

Guided by her simultaneous practices as a writer, curator, and dancer, in this talk Willis discusses the structuring devices of her thinking across these various platforms: methods for attending to the specificities of live, movement-driven performance in programming and on the page.

The series begins with residencies and talks in November 2024 with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Steffani Jemison, collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

In April 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the program culminates in a weekend of events: a performance by Leslie Cuyjet, an installation and performance by Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and artist talks by Steffani Jemison and Justine A. Chambers on their latest works which register archival and historical traces through gesture.
 

Ephemeral Organ is a series of residencies, performances, and talks by artists whose work explores choreography and bodily motion as technologies for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience. Each artist simultaneously navigates the ever-shifting nature of live performance and the urge to retain, return to, and generate traces of the past.

The word ephemeral suggests short-lived objects, activity that leaves residual evidence, and brief but intense durations. Archival materials not designed to be preserved but which are still potently present are often called ephemera. The word organ hints at the body and its parts, a series of interior vessels and chambers which intimately order—or organize—our modes of living. In dance and performance, bodies are often understood as having inherent archiving functions. Archives are spaces of public record, systems which give purpose to what we want to keep; our bodies hold experience, gain knowledge, recall behaviors, track gestures, and mediate infinite possible actions each time they move.

Interpreting archival materials, mining family memories, recording movement through technology—each Ephemeral Organ project holds past and present side by side, inseparably. Each of the artists has developed distinct choreographic devices through which performers can compose history through their bodies and which allows them to generate, keep, and even at times lovingly lose, a bodily record of their actions.

The series begins with residencies and talks in the fall of 2024, including with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY and collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, as well as series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

In April 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the Ephemeral Organ series culminates in a weekend of performance, installation, and artist talks, including with Leslie Cuyjet and Steffani Jemison.

In this performance and video installation, Marina Rosenfeld makes the American premiere of her commissioned work μ (mu). Louis Chude-Sokei accompanies the artist on transacoustic piano and Ben Vida performs alongside Rosenfeld during the event. Titled after the mathematical term for friction or touch, and inspired by the artist’s longstanding interest in turntablism, the work takes place along the surface of a dubplate at the moment of inscription.

In μ (mu), Rosenfeld has figured the dubplate (a one-off, hand-cut record) as a distinct audiovisual landscape—here, it is a scene that stages sonic and visual events activated by friction. Rather than merely playing the digital audio embedded in the record, μ (mu) explores surface phenomena along the material of the dubplate itself, capturing footage and images at an incredibly small scale as it traces the path of a sculptural stylus designed by Rosenfeld.

μ (mu) engages both sound’s material conditions and, through the work’s focus on touch, its social aspects. Rosenfeld has also composed a score—in part from the video's own mise-en-scene—which integrates turntable sounds and recordings that play with noise, analog synth, and forms of abrasion.

This presentation of μ (mu) includes a piano performance with a Yamaha transacoustic piano, expanding the work's exploration of the entanglement of acoustic resonance with digital sound. A transducer piano resonates any sound sent through it, digital or acoustic.

The EMPAC installation also imagines μ (mu)’s acetate dubplates as a counterpart to traditional film (of which acetate is also an important component), proposing the project as a point where the materiality of image-making, sound, and touch collide. 

Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century) is a performance jointly authored and performed by filmmaker Bassem Saad and writer Sanja Grozdanić that opens up a complex grammar of mourning in the face of impersonal, legal accounts of collective grief. The piece contends with the temporal, political, and intellectual fallout of so-called post-conflict societies beset by imperialist violence in the 20th century. Its plot centers on two traveling eulogists who encounter one another in a declining architectural estate. They must contend with the sense of an ending–of an epoch, of a revolution, of a regime.

Over the course of the performance, the project's characters gradually open up a dreamlike grasping after the principles of revolutions and their failures. Riffs off official political stances rupture suddenly into unfettered expressions that ride collective affects of public feeling and dissidence. The work touches on parallel histories--such as the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia and ongoing crises in and around Lebanon--as it shifts between the openly tragic and the melancholically absurd. What starts out as a formal reflection on a sort of "professional mourning" eventually unravels into a very different sort of historical reckoning.

This version of the performance, commissioned by EMPAC, expands the artists’ original script-based work to encompass a new sound score, film material, and additional experimental projection. Reflecting the artists’ iterative working method, this presentation includes material from their in-progress film of the same name, plus archival footage.

The artists approach this expanded version of Permanent Trespass as a cinepoem, building on avant-garde techniques for merging the sensibility of poetic writing with the possibilities of cinematic footage.

EMPAC building tours take visitors behind the scenes to experience the center’s infrastructure as few do. Each one is hosted by an EMPAC staff member with a different area of expertise—so whether you attend one or all this season, there’s always something new to learn and discover.

Join us! EMPAC Tours are offered at no cost and begin in the Main Lobby. Please plan to arrive 15 minutes before tour start time. Each tour runs approximately 90 minutes.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 AT 1PM
WITH ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR JONAS BRAASCH

Join Jonas Braasch for a tour highlighting the center’s architectural acoustics and learn how the EMPAC panorama screen system led to the development of the Rensselaer CRAIVE-Lab (Collaborative Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment).

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 AT 11AM
WITH CURATOR KATHERINE C.M. ADAMS

Join Katherine C.M. Adams for a behind-the-scenes look at EMPAC’s production facilities. Adams will discuss the acoustic and visual potential of each EMPAC venue for the making of complex performance works, including artists-in-residence Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić’s upcoming Permanent Trespass.

NEW DATE! SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 AT 11AM
WITH ENGINEERS STEPHANIE VAN SANDT & ERIC BRUCKER

Each of EMPAC’s performance spaces were designed as a blank canvas, endlessly customizable according to the needs of EMPAC’s diverse productions. Join Director for Stage Technologies Stephanie Van Sandt and Lead Video Engineer Eric Brucker for a behind-the-scenes tour of all the nuts and bolts that make the space work, and learn about how technology and creativity meld in collaboration with artists in the creation of new work.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 AT 11AM
WITH SENIOR NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR DAVE BEBB

Join Dave Bebb for a tour 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.

Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad share their artistic collaboration through a combined short screening program and artist talk. Over the past three years, Grozdanić and Saad have been jointly developing Permanent Trespass, a performance work dealing poetically with collective mourning and the fallout of imperialism and violent conflicts.

This script-based stage piece is now being expanded, in the spirit of a cinepoem, into a performance at EMPAC that incorporates new sound design, archival footage, and material from the in-progress film of the same name.

In their screening program and talk, the artists discuss their collaboration and current interests in connection to filmmaking: memory, mourning, the cultural fallout of conflicts in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia, and performance & dramaturgy.

The presentation will also feature a series of films that converge on thematic or formal grounds with Permanent Trespass in its various versions, selected jointly by the artists for this occasion.

Filmmaker Sharlene Bamboat shares her film project Both, Instrument & Sound during this event, which includes a viewing of the feature-length film, a look into a new installation-in-progress, and a moderated discussion.

Originally made as a 40 minute, 1-channel film, the work offers an intimate and sensorially rich perspective on shifting practices of solidarity and alliance-building. Refracted through the life of 80-year-old Tony, an activist in Toronto’s queer community, the work opens up to both political and intimate modes of relation.

In its filmic material, sound score, dialogue and theme, Both, Instrument & Sound dwells in forms of tension, touch, and friction as it explores the potential of collectivity against the backdrop of rising neoliberalism.

Bamboat has described Both, Instrument & Sound’s method as “tension as an aesthetic strategy.” Its sound score combines an array of sonic interpretations of tension, collaboratively developed with musicians and the film participants.

In a moderated discussion after the screening, Bamboat and her collaborator Kaija Sirala speak about developing the multi-screen version of the work while in residence at EMPAC.

Bamboat provides context on her larger practice and discusses the considerations involved in shifting a work made for theatrical viewing into an installation. Bamboat also speaks to the means she uses to consider solidarity and collective struggle in this work and past projects such as If From Every Tongue it Drips (2021) and The Wind Sleeps Standing Up (2016).