Amanda Turner Pohan is in residence at EMPAC with performer Katy Pinke to film Alexa Echoes. 

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker and choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates. The first iteration in a series of three, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant for Alexa, also named Echo. Produced after travel restrictions and social distancing measures were implemented at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film combines footage shot in the newly empty spaces of EMPAC with recordings from the collaborators’ homes and remote studios.

In this film, EMPAC is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Using choreographed movement, spoken word, and song set to an orchestral score, Alexa Echoes abstracts the gendered decisions that go into framing new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

This residency is organized by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and Rachel Vera Steinberg from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.

In light of COVID-19, Heartbeat Opera took its LADY M rehearsals and performances online. Rather than cancel its production, the company launched a 10-day remote residency (April 20–May 1) with their artists rehearsing at home, followed by a series of intimate Virtual Soirées through Zoom video conferencing from May 11–20. The full production arrives in Spring 2021.

This New York opera company was scheduled to come to EMPAC at the end of our spring season to develop a new reordered and reorchestrated version of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth, here renamed Lady M. The company was to use their time at EMPAC to collaborate with sound artist and RPI alumna Senem Pirler, creating the supernatural sound of the witches—manipulating their voices through electronic processing. In light of COVID-19, this collaboration happened online.

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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.

Lesley Flanigan is in residence in Studio 2 to produce a new EMPAC-commissioned performance-installation that continues her exploration into the sculptural potential of sound.

Developing a performance for voice, speakers, electronic tone, and the resonance between, this residency follows from her visit in early 2020 in which she explored the acoustic environment of EMPAC’s concert hall with sine-wave oscillators that generate low-frequency tones, her signature speaker sculpture instruments, and pitches from her own voice. 

Continuing her work here at EMPAC with spatial audio and in particular, EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, Nina C. Young will develop her acoustic brass quintet into a multimedia work for live musicians, spatial audio, and live video processing based on geometric forms and Renaissance music. The residency culminates in the premiere of the new evening-length work on March 19th in the Theater.

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.