Mivos Quartet are in residence at EMPAC to record Steve Reich’s three string quartets Different Trains, Triple Quartet, and WTC 9/11.

As long-time collaborators with Reich, Mivos Quartet is the first group to record and release all three quartets on a single album. Each of his quartets has one or two layers of quartet parts that must be pre- recorded. Mivos is working closely with Reich to re-record all of the backing tracks as well as the live quartet parts for an album that can serve as the definitive recording of these works.

Proclaimed by many as America's greatest living composer, Steve Reich is a musical icon. His body of work has largely defined a genre of modern music, which in turn has become one of the defining schools of American musical style. Reich’s three string quartets are modern masterpieces in string writing, pioneering his technique of interweaving field recordings and speech patterns into the fabric of the acoustic and electronic elements of the compositions.

Abstract turntablist Maria Chávez comes to EMPAC for the first of several residencies to develop a newly commissioned work. Her interest in exploring extremely quiet sounds will be developed in EMPAC’s acoustically generous spaces.

The Unarrival Experiments – Unconcealment Ceremonies is a new live performance installation work by artist Ni’Ja Whitson that is designed to amplify the dark. In dialogue with Yorùbá Cosmology, Astrophysics, and research on the “blackest black,” the work centers the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy through a Black, Queer, and Transembodied lens. Dark matter and dark energy serve as portals to interrogating spaces of the unknown, yet that which have an unequivicated impact on the composition of the universe.

Spring 2023

Sage Ni’Ja Whitson is in residence at EMPAC for three weeks to work with architect Valery Augustin on designing a dome structure to aid in visualizing darkness while also allowing for the seamless integration of immersive VR, projection, and spatial audio.

Spring 2022

Artist Ni’Ja Whitson is at EMPAC to continue set, lighting, video, and Virtual Reality design for their upcoming EMPAC commission, The Unarrival Experiments — Unconcealment Ceremonies. Work includes developing a proof of concept for a performance dome.

Summer 2020

Whitson is in residence at EMPAC to design a performance dome that aids in visualizing darkness while also allowing for the seamless integration of immersive VR, projection, and spatial audio. The highly technical multimedia environment will cradle performers and audience members alike in embodied encounter, collectivity, invisibility, and cosmos.

Ellsworth and her technical collaborators will meet with EMPAC engineers to develop a new work. Ellsworth will present past works and share the process behind the new work in a work-in-progress event.

Choreographer Christopher K. Morgan is in residence with artistic collaborator Brenda Mallory to design and construct a set for the choreographer’s new work, Native Intelligence / Innate Intelligence. There will be a work-in-progress event at EMPAC before the work premieres at Dance Place in Washington, DC, in spring 2020.

Sondra Perry makes videos, performances, and installations that foreground digital tools as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and remobilize their potential.

Perry’s engagement with consumer image-making technologies produces artworks that reveal the calibration, protocols, and algorithms inherent in these devices. She repurposes exercise machines, video games, chroma studios, and computer graphics in multidisciplinary artworks that together form a corrective against the unreflective naturalization of technology. Her works examine how images are produced in order to reveal the way photographic representations are captured and recirculated.

Lesley Flanigan came to EMPAC to record her work Residue for voice and speaker sculptures. The recording residency focused on longer forms, as originally conceived for her performance of this work at the Guggenheim.

Spring 2020

Choreographer and new-media artist Su Wen-Chi has returned with three collaborators to explore live interaction between a performer, EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, and light. The artist will explore the concept of gravity and the residency will culminate in a work-in-progress event.

Fall 2019

Choreographer and new media artist Su Wen-Chi is in residence, attending the Spatial Audio Summer Seminar and meeting with Curator Ashley Ferro-Murray and production team members to discuss a potential production residency in January 2020.

>>returner<< is a performance work spanning theater and dance that illustrates different relationships between nature, people, and technology. Conceived by the Norwegian performance company Findlay//Sandsmark, led by Iver Findlay and Marit Sandsmark, the performance features motion-capture and animation technology, which interacts live with video and sound content. In addition to these digital media, the performers inhabit a world of natural stage elements including wooden sticks, a narrow wooden hallway, and a large cube that transforms over the course of the performance. What results is a performance environment in which audience expectations are both met and defied as the two performers play with perception and sensation. 

Findlay and Sandsmark are in residence at EMPAC with their company to further develop the project’s body-sensor and animation content. In its use of this technology, >>returner<< demonstrates a wariness of the inflexible binaries that one-to-one body-technology interactions engender: including presence/absence, natural/manufactured, and real/virtual. The performance weaves between and around these binaries to question them without dismantling them entirely—a nod to their unavoidable if not regrettable ubiquity in our daily lives. Attempting to avoid the trap of technophillic engagement, >>returner<< creates an at-times chilling piece of performance.