King Britt and Saul Williams developed a short new work together for electronics and spoken word to be realized within the ambisonic dome of Studio 1. The duo gave an exclusive performance at Utrecht's Le Guess Who? Festival last year, after being specifically invited by guest curator Moor Mother.
Main Image: King Britt & Saul Williams. Courtesy the artists.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, United States Artists, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Herb Alpert Award.
Through video and audio examples and a bit of live demonstration, composer/performer and interdisciplinary artist Pamela Z will share her work and her process, and will discuss the increasingly blurred lines between disciplines in her practice. Highlighting her use of voice, processing, gesture-based MIDI controllers, video, found objects, and sampled speech sounds, she will illustrate the various directions her work has taken over the years and consider the new work she’ll create during her upcoming EMPAC residency.
Main Image: Pamela Z. Photo: Courtesy the artist.
Pamela Z: Process and Performance, October 15, 2020
Through video and audio examples and a bit of live demonstration, composer/performer and interdisciplinary artist Pamela Z will share her work and her process, and will discuss the increasingly blurred lines between disciplines in her practice. Highlighting her use of voice, processing, gesture-based MIDI controllers, video, found objects, and sampled speech sounds, she will illustrate the various directions her work has taken over the years and consider the new work she’ll create during her upcoming EMPAC residency.
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All current EMPAC residencies are being hosted remotely with support from EMPAC curatorial, administrative, and production staff and resources. While no artists are on site in Troy, our staff is continuing to collaborate with artists toward the development of new works.
Professor and department head of Rensselaer's Science and Technology Studies program, Nancy Campbell, will hold her graduate seminar Feminist and Antiracist Science and Technology Studies in EMPAC's Studio Beta. The course is a part of the university's Art_x program, which is a teaching and learning initiative that is designed for Rensselaer students discover the connections that exist between art, science, and technology. EMPAC curators Vic Brooks and Ashley Ferro-Murray will develop a small series of workshops around course topics with artists Anaïs Duplan and Edisa Weeks.
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. Duplan’s recently published essay collection Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020) employs vivid descriptions of the action of artworks—or ekphrastic technique—to explore the aesthetic strategies employed by artists of color working with digital technologies. At EMPAC, Duplan will be expand Blackspace’s approach to lyric poetry, criticism, and interviews through a series of radio-events inspired by music and artworks that seek to “pursue liberatory possibility.”
Edisa Weeks is a Brooklyn, NY based choreographer, educator and director of DELIRIOUS Dances. Weeks is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work integrates theater, dance, food, discussions, music, and visual illustrations to create interactive performance experiences. She has presented in venues ranging from Dixon Place to the Guggenheim Museum, and has also performed in swimming pools, senior centers, sidewalks, storefront windows, and various living rooms. Weeks is currently developing three interactive performance rituals titled 3 RITES: Life, Liberty, Happiness. At EMPAC, she will design an environmentally sustainable set of plastics for Life. The rite will explore various structures for the support and dismantling of life.
Main Image: Anaïs Duplan's Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture and Edisa Weeks' THREE RITES: Life, 2019. Images Courtesy the artists.
An online talk with composer Caroline Shaw and choreographer Vanessa Goodman discussing their work-in-progress collaborative installation Graveyards and Gardens (working title).
Main Image: Caroline Shaw and Vanessa Goodman. Photos: Courtesy the artists.
Theater maker Annie Saunders collaborates with theater/pop/new music band Wild Up and composer Emma O’Halloran on a new work called Rest. The work engages an audience with simple guidance on how to interact with each other and the performance space. Overall, Rest interrogates sensory overwhelm, sensory deprivation, hallucinations and the nature of consciousness. The audience experience is inspired by the idea that our perception of reality depends on agreements and disagreements with other people.
Light and sound are central to the staging of Rest. These elements help to sculpt a performance environment that includes moments of near-silence, music, and field recordings from a diverse set of conversations. Materials include conversations with consciousness experts, people sharing their early sense memories, and reflections on our relationships to our smartphones. The work provides a visceral opportunity to feel and consider what ‘rest’ means to us in the modern world.
The artistic collaborators are in remote residence this fall to develop an EMPAC-commissioned online iteration of Rest. The commission will provide the artists an opportunity to explore their archive of material. The outcome is unknown, but the process of building and experiencing this online work will provide a look inside immersive, multidisciplinary theatrical practices.
The commissioned work will premiere in January 2021. Join us on December 3, 2020 for a conversations with the artists who will discuss the making of the work.
Listen now on Anchor.fm, Breaker, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Spotify, Castbox, and Tunein.
Main Image: Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Annie Saunders
Theater maker Annie Saunders collaborates with theater/pop/new music band Wild Up and composer Emma O’Halloran on a new work called Rest. The work engages an audience with simple guidance on how to interact with each other and the performance space. Overall, Rest interrogates sensory overwhelm, sensory deprivation, hallucinations and the nature of consciousness. The audience experience is inspired by the idea that our perception of reality depends on agreements and disagreements with other people.
Light and sound are central to the staging of Rest. These elements help to sculpt a performance environment that includes moments of near-silence, music, and field recordings from a diverse set of conversations. Materials include conversations with consciousness experts, people sharing their early sense memories, and reflections on our relationships to our smartphones. The work provides a visceral opportunity to feel and consider what ‘rest’ means to us in the modern world.
The artistic collaborators are in residence this fall to develop an EMPAC-commissioned online iteration of Rest. The commission will provide the artists an opportunity to explore their archive of material. The outcome is unknown, but the process of building and experiencing this online work will provide a look inside immersive, multidisciplinary theatrical practices.
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All current EMPAC residencies are being hosted remotely with support from EMPAC curatorial, administrative, and production staff and resources. While no artists are on site in Troy, our staff is continuing to collaborate with artists toward the development of new works.
Main Image: Courtesy the artist. Photo: Johnathon Potter.
EMPAC continues to be closed for in-person events for the general public, however, please check back here and follow us on
Instagram for updates related to our curatorial program.
Although our fall program will look different than it has in the past as we continue to follow university policies related to the coronavirus, we are continuing work with artists on the commissioning and production of new ambitious performances and artworks across music, time-based visual art, theater and dance.
We look forward to sharing behind-the-scenes peeks into artist residencies along the way. Stay tuned!
A path emerges when the same section of land is trodden repeatedly; where the grass has been trampled or the dirt stomped. These paths are called desire lines, which are alternate, unofficial routes or trails in nature and landscape architecture. Choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener apply this concept to a dance improvisation practice that maps individual and collective action. The resultant social and movement interactions between dancing individuals produce a choreographic world that is built of its own desires. The project, titled Desire Lines, is an extended work that the artists have developed over years. They have staged the practice for audiences in a theater, a gallery, and outdoors. With each iteration, shifting models for coexistence, assimilation, and rebellion emerge.
Rashaun Mitchell & Silas 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 with Charles Atlas for Tesseract curated by Vic Brooks in 2016.
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All current EMPAC residencies are being hosted remotely with support from EMPAC curatorial, administrative, and production staff and resources. While no artists are on site in Troy, our staff is continuing to collaborate with artists toward the development of new works.
Main Image: Desire Lines in Madison Square Park, 2017. Photo: Paula Lobo.
DELIRIOUS Dances/Edisa Weeks will meet with the EMPAC production team to explore set and lighting design for 3 RITES: Life, which is part of a trilogy about life, liberty, and happiness.
Weeks is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work integrates theater, dance, food, discussions, music, and visual illustrations to create interactive performance experiences.
With her collaborators, You-Shin Chin (set), Tim Cryan (lighting), Sarita Fellows (costume), and Marýa Wethers (Producer). Weeks considers different proposals for a tour-able and environmentally sustainable set. The design will help to communicate the enormity of plastic waste in our contemporary culture; and how the production and consumption of plastics are impacting life, especially in communities of color.
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All current EMPAC residencies are being hosted remotely with support from EMPAC curatorial, administrative, and production staff and resources. While no artists are on site in Troy, our staff is continuing to collaborate with artists toward the development of new works.
Main Image: Work in progress showing. Photo: Rebecca Fitton.
Courtesy the artist. Photo: Edisa Weeks