In 2019 Patricia Alessandrini was commissioned by Die Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik in Germany to compose a long-scale work with electronics for JACK quartet, which initiated the collaboration between composer and quartet.

In a further development of her practice of compositionally "interpreting" works from the past (reflected by the tongue-in-cheek reference to canonicity evoked in her title) Alessandrini incorporates a variety of works from the Western classical music canon into this piece. Using live electronics, materials from the recordings appear through the playing of the quartet.

Spatial distribution of the multi-channel electronic sounds in the performance space plays a key role in the melding and separation of the various works "interpreted" and interwoven with the playing of the live quartet. These spatial elements will be developed at EMPAC in addition to the real-time processing, concatenation and filtering techniques of the recordings.

After several postponements due to the pandemic, the work is now scheduled to be premièred at Die Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 2023. In the meantime, it will receive its first public pre-première by JACK quartet at Merkin Hall in New York City on 21 April, 2022 alongside works by Khyam Allami and George Lewis.

Bailey Scieszka’s Conspiracy Influencer is a four-part theatrical extravaganza premiering at EMPAC. This newly commissioned performance combines puppetry, clownery, and drag. It is set in a madcap world populated by characters like anthropomorphic Skittles, Nixon’s dead dog, a talking Comet pizza slice, a mob of Beanie Babies, and a demonic clown named Old Put (Scieszka’s alter ego). The cast of puppets satirize the wacky conspiracy theories that spawn in dark corners of the internet and contribute to the polarized socio-political landscape in the United States. Over the course of the performance follow Old Put’s meteoric rise from humble content creator, who unboxes dolls on Youtube, to celebrity influencer at the center of a disinformation campaign. The performance is the climax of Scieszka’s collaboration with curators from CCS Bard, EMPAC’s production team, and Philadelphia-based composer Joseph Hallman.

The play explores the ways in which history is remembered, resurrected, and sensationalized in America's entertainment-centered culture. The dense, absurdist, and hilarious dialogue in Conspiracy Influencer is steeped in the vocabulary of celebrity gossip, the internet, and social media. The characters reference ideas drawn from 24-hour blog and cable news outlets, cyclically mutated on the subcultural message boards of Reddit, 4chan, and Youtube’s comment sections. Scieszka critically alludes to fabulists who underwrite white American ideology in these forums, humorously and acerbically recasting the iconography of populism via Old Put and their puppet ensemble. Scieszka uses this divisive visual and verbal rhetoric as an emotional counterweight to her otherwise bright and playful imagery in a work that emasculates the trolls of the internet’s echo chambers. Laced with clever pop culture references and outlandish hijinks, this puppet show is a pointed meditation on the current state of collective consciousness in the United States.

Conspiracy Influencer is curated by Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Min Sun Jeon, and Guy Weltchek, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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Please join us for the online premiere of Conspiracy Influencer on May 26 at 7PM. 

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger presents a work-in-progress screening of his new multi-channel moving image work, followed by a discussion with curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley on the production and themes of the work.  

This work is part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, a project that incorporates artist-made regalia, props, videos, and performance, and explores alternative possible futures for sites of post-industrial extraction, reimaging them anew through speculative oral histories for the future. 

All aspects of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s installation have been produced in residence at EMPAC with Ginger Dunnill, their two children 'Io Kahoku and Tsesa, and project curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Yihsuan Chiu, Christine Nyce, and Gee Wesley.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) and streaming online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Centred around an audio play, a video installation, and material in vitrines, A Slightly Curving Place responds to the work of Umashankar Manthravadi, a self-taught acoustic archaeologist who has been listening to premodern performance spaces.

Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light is a ritualistic installation-performance of fragmented Renaissance polyphony, spatial audio, projections, and hanging brass instrument sculptures that creates ephemeral architectural spaces using overhead wave field synthesis and recordings of performance and improvisations by American Brass Quintet. The work is rooted in the legacy of the relationship between architecture and antiphonal music practices. 

“Wave Field Synthesis offers a unique opportunity to create aural architectures using audio holograms that you can explore, physically, without relying on the ‘sweet’ spot of many spatial audio systems. You can immerse yourself in an ephemeral, morphing, virtual architecture with the agency to sculpt your own experience and personal ritual.” 
—Nina C. Young

Nina C. Young began working with EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis system in early 2020. Her first sonic composition for EMPACwave, Phosphorescent Devotion (2021)—loosely inspired by the light and color combinations of James Turrell— premiered at TIME:SPANS festival and was recently presented at EMPAC for the Rensselaer campus community. Young’s works range from concert pieces to interactive installations that explore aural architectures, resonance, and ephemera. She dialogues with natural acoustic environments, instrumental performance techniques, and digital signal processing. Nina is a professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music. She was on the faculty of Rensselaer’s Department of the Arts from 2016–18. 

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This performance is being presented for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only at this time.

Continuing her work with EMPAC's Wave Field Synthesis Array, Nina C. Young will be in residence to develop and finalize her EMPAC-commissioned multimedia work. Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light is a ritualistic installation-performance of fragmented Renaissance polyphony, spatial audio, projections, and hanging brass instrument sculptures that creates ephemeral architectural spaces using overhead wave field synthesis and recordings of performance and improvisations by American Brass Quintet. The work is rooted in the legacy of the relationship between architecture and antiphonal music practices. The residency culminates in the premiere of a new work on April 21, 2022 in the theater.

Continuing her exploration into the sculptural potential of sound, Lesley Flanigan presents a performance for voice, speakers, electronic tone, and the resonance between.

This EMPAC-commission marks a shift in Flanigan’s approach to her work. Rather than performing live, her voice exists within a cluster of small wooden speakers that act as a choral ensemble staged in the center of the room. In contrast to this ensemble of speakers, large full-range loudspeakers are positioned in the four corners of Studio 2, wrapping the space in a moving wash of pure electronic tone. Inside the installation, the audience will experience a series of compositions that act as a meditation on how we listen, and on how that listening encounters electronic tone, the physical qualities of amplification, and the fragility of voice.

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This performance is being presented for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only at this time. Attendance is limited so please register early.

Curator-in-residence Nida Ghouse is collaborating with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks on research towards their forthcoming exhibition Shifting Center, for which they are recipients of a Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Shifting Center will be presented at EMPAC in fall 2023 and considers the often-overlooked acoustic practices in contemporary art and exhibition-making as they relate to cultural memory, colonial history, and decolonial processes. More specifically, this curatorial research and the subsequent exhibition investigates the politics of sound by considering two opposing tendencies at play within contemporary art exhibitions and colonial museums: dislocation (objects, artworks, and cultural belongings taken from their original context and silenced through the mechanisms of museological preservation and display); and location (how architecture and acoustics impact the experience of exhibitions as resonant spaces of sited and situated listening). 

Curatorial research in preparation for the exhibition will span two years and will comprise international travel for studio and site visits, interviews, and archival research. The curators will meet with artists and specialists where they work as well as convene at EMPAC for discussions about acoustic display and spatial audio technology. This period of research is itself an exercise in listening to and learning from others, an essentially communal and temporal practice that is not only rooted in the present but looks for how past ways of knowing and practices of listening can inform an exhibition today. 

In this talk, artist Ni’Ja Whitson presents their work with Virtual Reality (VR) as it relates to the creation to their upcoming EMPAC production and performance of The Unarrival Experiments — Unconcealment Ceremonies. The project uses VR to center the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy through a Black, Queer, and Transembodied lens. To do so, Whitson is designing a performance space of “both/and”: both movement and stillness, both darkness and image, both engulfment and distancing, both listening and feeling. As an extension of Whitson’s design process, they will use this talk to propose new futures for VR with questions that beg to remain unanswered.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) and streaming online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.