The African Desperate follows artist Palace Bryant on one very long day in 2017 that starts with her MFA graduation in New York’s Hudson Valley and ends at the Chicago Blue Line Station. Set against the lush backdrop of late summer, Palace navigates the pitfalls of self-actualization and the fallacies of the art world.

Shot through with Martine Syms' celebrated conceptual grit, humor, social commentary, and vivid visual language, and starring artist Diamond Stingily, The African Desperate leads us on an intimate and riotously funny journey through picturesque landscapes and artists’ studios, from academic critiques to backseat hookups, and from the night of a wild graduation party to the morning of a lonely trip back home.

A conversation with Martine Syms will follow the screening. 

A four-year archival, research, and multi-genre storytelling project on the life journey of a Lyricist. PROPHET: The Order of the Lyricist, illuminates the distinctive practices, systems, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped Hip Hop’s Emcee/Lyricists.

Tracing the evolution of artist Mental from Emcee to Lyricist, 7NMS invites audiences to enter a world of mind power, bravery, self-determination, and triumph- facets of the artist's quest for self-realization.

PROPHET makes its own imaginative evening-length performance contribution to the scholarly, civic, and ancient bodies of radical Black expression. Light and moving-image visuals as well as multi-channel audio installation will accompany the live dance and vocal performances. Such environments layering multiple media are the company's signature aesthetic; previous work like Memoirs of a Unicorn featured a built multi-sited environment of sculpture, light, sound, movement, costume, and projection. PROPHET is an extension of this practice that acknowledges the Emcee and Lyricist’s role and presence more explicitly.

While taking its primary shape as a live performance at EMPAC, PROPHET will also manifest as an ethnographic memoir, an experimental film, and an album.

Rensselaer Professor Michael Century is at EMPAC to give a talk celebrating the launch of his new book, Northern Sparks: Innovation, Technology Policy, and the Arts in Canada from Expo 67 to the Internet Age, published by MIT Press.

Understanding how experimental art catalyzes technological innovation is often prized yet typically reduced to the magic formula of “creativity.” In Northern Sparks, Century emphasizes the role of policy and institutions by showing how novel art forms and media technologies in Canada emerged during a period of political and social reinvention, starting in the 1960s with the energies unleashed by Expo 67.

Debunking conventional wisdom, Century reclaims innovation from both its present-day devotees and detractors by revealing how experimental artists critically challenge as well as discover and extend the capacities of new technologies. He offers a series of detailed cross-media case studies that illustrate the cross-fertilization of art, technology, and policy. These cases span animation, music, sound art and acoustic ecology, cybernetic cinema, interactive installation art, virtual reality, telecommunications art, software applications, and the emergent metadiscipline of human-computer interaction. They include Norman McLaren's “proto-computational” film animations; projects in which the computer itself became an agent, as in computer-aided musical composition and choreography; an ill-fated government foray into interactive networking, the videotext system Telidon; and the beginnings of virtual reality at the Banff Centre.

Century shows how Canadian artists approached new media technologies as malleable creative materials, while Canada undertook a political reinvention alongside its centennial celebrations. Northern Sparks offers a uniquely nuanced account of innovation in art and technology illuminated by critical policy analysis.

Michael Century, a musician and media arts historian, is Professor of Music and New Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He founded the Media Arts program at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Northern Sparks will be available at a signing table hosted by Market Block Books following the lecture.

The New York State DanceForce will host its annual meetings at EMPAC as a part of the center’s curated artist residency program. The DanceForce, founded in 1994, began as a think-tank to examine problems and opportunities facing the dance field within New York State and with the goal of re-energizing the art form. Since then, the DanceForce has grown to become a statewide network of eighteen dance organizers committed to increasing the amount and quality of dance activity across New York.

An equally important aspect of the DanceForce’s mission is to bring together their members and other regional dance organizers to discuss challenges, share ideas, view new work, and exchange information relevant to the field. These meetings help to link cultural organizers and give them, and the dance communities they serve, increased tools to support dance in their area. EMPAC will serve as the home base for these convenings, and will collaborate with the DanceForce to present the work of Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener as a part of the events.

Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener are at EMPAC for a lecture and demonstration of their work for the New York State Dance Force annual convening, which will take place at EMPAC this year.

Mitchell and Riener have been working together since 2010 when they worked in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Since then the duo has developed numerous small and large scale works that have been produced worldwide. The artists were last at EMPAC for a remote residency to work on their current project Desire Lines, which they will continue to develop at EMPAC. They also previously worked at EMPAC in 2016 with Charles Atlas for Tesseract curated by Vic Brooks.

This private showing is co-produced with the New York State DanceForce.

Sound artist and musician Tim Bruniges will be in residence with support from the Australia Council for the Arts. Through the use of live, regenerating audio systems his performance and installation projects aim to foreground the volumetric, tactile experience of sound. During his residency Bruniges will work with live audio, tape, and EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array to develop new work.

In 2019 Bruniges was awarded a PhD for his research on live sound installation practice and was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award and Research Excellence award from UNSW Art & Design. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts from COFA, UNSW, and a Bachelor of Arts (Mus) with distinction from the University of Western Sydney. His works have been exhibited in Australia, USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Iceland, Russia, and Dubai, and written about in Artsy, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. His work is held in private collections and at Artbank Australia. 

Supported by the Flanders Department of Culture, Youth and Media, Marco Fusi is in residence in Studio 1 with Patricia Alessandrini to work on EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array.

Fusi’s work with Wave Field Synthesis expands his research and performance practice through a collaboration with Alessandrini that explores acoustic feedback through technological and instrumental interaction. Fusi plays the viola d'amore (VdA), a baroque instrument that can generate and control acoustic feedback through performance techniques. Working with Wave Field technology enhances the possibilities for feedback within and outside the VdA, blurring the distinction between virtual and physical sonic sources.

Choreographer Adam Weinert is in residence in EMPAC’s Concert Hall with five collaborators to develop and stage a new dance performance, ANTHEM, which dissects the national anthem and considers what it means to evolve beyond nostalgia for an America-that-never-was.

Conspiracy Influencer is a series of four newly-commissioned plays by Bailey Scieszka. Combining puppetry, clownery, multimedia elements, and live theater, the performance satirizes the ways in which the flow of information on the internet creates an often polarized, contentious political and social culture in the US. Featuring a madcap cast of characters including anthropomorphized consumer products, chaotic circus clowns, and Richard Nixon’s family pet, Conspiracy Influencer transcends its campy facade, inviting the audience to engage in a thoughtful meditation on the current state of collective consciousness in this country.

Scieszka will be in residence at EMPAC between May 2–13, 2022, during which time she will work closely with the EMPAC production team as well as guest curators Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Min Sun Jeon, and Guy Weltchek—all current students at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Utilizing many of the production facilities at EMPAC, Scieszka will develop set and lighting design, paint backdrops, edit sound and video, and rehearse Conspiracy Influencer within the two weeks of her residency, culminating in a performance for a live audience in EMPAC’s Theater.

Conspiracy Influencer will premiere for Rensselaer students, faculty, and staff in the theater on Friday, May 13th at 7PM and online on Thursday, May 26 at 7PM.