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.

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.