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.

Serpentine is a solo performance that centralizes choreographic repetition and insistence to explore the occupation of space, time, and attention over the course of two hours. It will be installed in the Lobby of EMPAC. What is designed as a cathartic work for a performer, or interpreter, is staged in close proximity to an audience who might be moved to find their own relationship to repetition and insistence. 

The work vibrates the essence of choreographer Daina Ashbee’s dark and feminine oeuvre and intensely summarizes the artist’s previous three works, Unrelated (2014), When the ice melts, will we drink the water? (2016) and Pour (2016). Each of these performances features subtly specific choreographic exploration and simple imagery that is meant to resonate with many different viewers. At its core, the work is a deep study of bodies in movement as they relate to their environment; cultural, social, performative, and natural circumstances. 

Serpentine includes original electric organ composition by Jean-Francois Blouin. The haunting electric organ creates sonic space for slow, sensual movement to escalate in its violence.

The talk tonight at EMPAC is canceled due to weather delays from tropical storm Nicole. Please join Ricardo and Amy for their workshop at the Sanctuary for Independent Media Thursday at 7PM. Check the Sanctuary website for the most up-to-date information on Thursday.

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In this talk, Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll of the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 discuss a brief history of the collective’s previous work in relation to borders; the relationship between NAFTA, US Prevention through Deterrence philosophy, the binational War on Drugs, and the emergence of border art as genre. 

Each decade of the twentieth century triggered draconian refinements of the “border horror” of U.S. immigration policy. Resulting borderization in the twenty-first century continues as such, now with blurred divides between the flow of goods and the blockage of human beings. Supply chain disruptions and queued shipping containers and the US invocation of Title 42 and “Stay in Mexico” policies, while never comparable, are in equal measure “products” of COVID-19.

Among others, the artists will reflect on the influences, production and distribution challenges, and discordant reception of the collective’s Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project that debuted fifteen years ago. This project consists of an app designed to provide sustenance in grueling desert conditions like those that abut the US-Mexico Border. The app consists of poetry and a navigational system that points users toward water sources provided by humanitarian aid organizations like Water Station Inc.

The talk concludes with a discussion of Carroll and Dominguez’s new work-in-progress theater production, “The Flight of the Palindrone.” This project instrumentalizes drone activity to provide a sonic theatrical intervention that plays on surveillance technologies in the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, the participation of the University of California, San Diego (the artists’ own institution) in the research and development of unmanned aerial vehicles, and regional eco-catastrophe—all within the context of Carroll and Dominguez’s continued commitment to translanguaging and the artivist gesture. 

In addition to this talk, Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez will host a workshop from 7-9PM on Thursday November 10, 2022 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Troy, NY. 

What would our anthem be if we wrote it today? What would it sound like, look like, and who should it serve?

Adam Weinert spent years investigating imagery of The American Dream and the radical patriotism of early American modern dance. In his new EMPAC-commissioned ANTHEM, Weinert seeks to reconcile dewy Americana with our society’s deep fissures, inequalities, and environmental degradation.

The movement in ANTHEM draws from a fake news article describing imagined original choreography from 1916 meant to accompany the national anthem. The performers begin to dissect the song and its various incarnations to relate it to a 21st-century America. The choreography reinforces the familiar and patriotic sounds of American nostalgia, yet, the work takes us into new territory that is only achievable through systems of mutual support.

Join us for a special screening of Ephraim Asili’s debut feature-film The Inheritance (2020), produced at EMPAC on a film set constructed in Studio 1—Goodman. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artist. 

Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance weaves histories of the West Philadelphia–based MOVE Organization, the Black Arts Movement, and dramatizations of the life of the filmmaker when he was a member of a Black activist collective. Centering on what Asili describes as a “speculative reenactment” of his time in a West Philadelphia collective, the actors scripted lives on set are entwined with cameos by MOVE's Debbie Africa, Mike Africa Sr., and Mike Africa Jr., and poet-activists Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker.

After the EMPAC preview of The Inheritance in Spring 2020 was postponed due to COVID-19 protocols, it premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and went on to screen at festivals and museums around the world including the New York Film Festival and the National Gallery of Art. The film was awarded the Grand Prize at Paris film festival Cinéma du Réel in 2021.

Join us for a special preview of director Daniel Weintraub's new feature-length film, Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, a documentary that traces the life and work of visionary composer, musician, teacher, technological innovator, and Rensselaer distinguished research professor of music Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016).

An electronic music pioneer, Oliveros' approach to composition sought to produce a place, sound, and experience outside the normative conventions of Western music. Dispensing with the primacy of the concert hall, the virtuosic musician, and the hierarchically disciplined relationship of audience and performer, Oliveros instead approached music through Deep Listening, her meditative practice of sound and body experiments structured by concentrated attention to the acoustic environment. 

Produced in collaboration with executive producer IONE, Oliveros' partner in life and work, and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc., the film combines rare archival footage, including recordings from her performances at EMPAC, with intimate interviews that illuminate Oliveros' radical experiments with sound, technology, and philosophy that define her life of listening. 

A Q&A with Daniel Weintraub and IONE will follow the screening. 

How does art need to conceive of itself to be an agent of environmental justice? In this online talk, filmmaker and activist Ashish Ghadiali and curator Lucia Pietroiusti discuss projects including Scorching Suns, Rising Seas and Equilibrium (2019). By focusing on artworks, methodologies and conceptual frameworks, the talk will outline the principles behind Radical Ecology, an organization dedicated to supporting climate justice through creative practice.

Ashish Ghadiali is a filmmaker and activist who works for racial justice and environmental justice in diverse contexts. He is Strategic Advisor on Climate Justice at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and co-chair of the Black Atlantic Innovation Network at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

Lucia Pietroiusti is a curator working at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, usually outside of the gallery format. Pietroiusti is the founder of the General Ecology project at Serpentine Galleries, London, where she is currently Strategic Advisor for Ecology.