In this program, Critical Intimacies: Feminist Imaginative Technologies, artist and filmmaker Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, together with writer and film/performance researcher Katie Kirkland, offer an experimental lecture through dialogue and the exchange of films and texts.

Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland explore the feminine and anti-colonial gaze across performance, video, and cinema. How can we practice critical intimacy within the realm of art, cinema, and theory, i.e. how can we de-construct and construct simultaneously? How can we transform tools of oppression into tools of liberation?

Focusing on feminist forms of resistance and re-enactment, kinship and transmission, Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland center on female artists and theorists with ancestry from East and Southeast Asia whose work grapples with legacies of Western imperialism.

As they discuss specific artistic and theoretical works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and others, they consider the use of hybridity to resist epistemic violence, cultivate self-reflexivity, and build critical intimacy.

Through this program, Nguyen-Chi also explores approaches and themes relevant to her work on the forthcoming film project Letter to the Father (working title), which will be co-produced by EMPAC.

Dramatis Personae is a combined film and talk program that takes inspiration from theatermaker and choreographer Jack Ferver’s practice, giving audiences the chance to engage with ideas and techniques relevant to their work and new commission. The program frames a live reading by the artist of a section of their in-progress work My Town, co-commissioned by EMPAC and NYU Skirball.

Dramatis Personae addresses the performance of self and includes a brief selection of short films and excerpts, including Nowhere Apparent, a short film by Jeremy Jacob starring Ferver, who also created the script and choreography. Other featured filmmakers: Skip Blumberg, Ken Kobland, and David Wojnarowicz with Jesse Hultberg.

Ferver’s work engages with queer performance, the fabrication of personas, and what the artist has called auto-mythology. As a choreographer, Ferver has been influenced by the work of Martha Graham, a pioneer of modern dance, characteristic of sweeping, expressive movements and a vivid relationship to power and vulnerability. Ferver’s choreography works in tandem with their script, which moves through psychological iconography.

Ferver’s theatrical influences have ranged from absurdist theatermakers like the French playwright Jean Genet, to performance in pop culture. Their theatrical work has also often been placed in dialogue with the legacy of camp, a minor genre of performance associated with a self-consciously exaggerated and artificial style.

Ferver knowingly takes up this style in a way that pushes it into new registers of embodiment and self-narration. Considering camp as one of the many ways of playing a role, Dramatis Personae also engages with the ways we are haunted by and re-perform personal and collective archetypes.

Who is the Rhythmanalyst and what is his laboratory? Following on his spring 2023 project Speakers That Speak to You, artist DeForrest Brown Jr. returns to EMPAC to ask: what comes after techno? How do we imagine new models of the music studio and of distribution, and how might these feed back into ways of capturing and assessing the sonic profile of technology today? This program offers a demo and preview of Brown’s new project, Rhythmanalytics, intended to culminate in a new album as well as a book.

Rhythmanalytics finds sound tunneling through space, through the ear, and then linking back to larger infrastructures of post-digital futures. Using the studio space as a meta-instrument, Brown explores non-repetitive rhythms and tonal shifts, probing rhythm as both techno’s primary means and as a way of calibrating the material conditions of production and logistics.

In addition to a live listening session offered during the event, Brown joins music scholar Louis Chude-Sokei in conversation to explore questions raised by Brown’s new project and their shared interests around Black culture, music technology, and discourses of Afrofuturism and posthumanism. A key question in Brown’s new project is sonic compression: of live performance into recording, of dimensional sound into a file, acoustic into digital matter.

The INTERFACE seminar series was created in collaboration with the Office of Research with a mind toward presenting some ideas about the technology and research opportunities that the EMPAC building will provide.

Possible topics include visualization, acoustics, cognitive science, haptics, graphics, etc. So put on your twirly cap and cummon down and join us for a discussion with our amazing Rensselaer professors and their research that is sure to blow your socks off!

Within | Without Limit: Music for Cello is a series of two solo performances from internationally acclaimed musician Charles Curtis. The two programs feature delicate yet visceral works that challenge—and reward—the listener, opening up new musical landscapes both outside and within the work.

The second program takes full advantage of the generous acoustic properties of the Concert Hall while also showcasing repertoire that asks the listener to attend to subtle processes of transformation and speculation. Composer Carolyn Chen’s Rara Avis (2015) draws from the early-17th century piece Woodycock—anonymous in both authorial attribution and in its peculiar evocation of an elusive woodland bird. Éliane Radigue’s Occam V (2012) continues her series of solo and ensemble pieces Occam Ocean, written for individual instrumentalists; each performer’s technique and relationship to their instrument provide the foundation for the musical material. Curtis’s own Unfinished Song (1998), a work for multiple cellos and sine waves, is an immersive, swirling, and contrapuntal work influenced by the harmonic world of alternate tunings, renaissance music, South Asian raga-style improvisation, and the song structures of popular music.

Program

• Woodycock (17th c.)
• Anonymous
• Rara Avis (2015)
• Carolyn Chen
• Occam V (2012)
• Éliane Radigue
• Hélas! et comment (14th c.)
• Guillaume de Machaut
• C’est force, faire (14th c.)
• Machaut
• Unfinished Song (1998)
• Charles Curtis

Within | Without Limit: Music for Cello is a series of two solo performances from internationally acclaimed musician Charles Curtis. The two programs feature delicate yet visceral works that challenge—and reward—the listener, opening up new musical landscapes both outside and within the work.

NALDJORLAK

Composed specifically for Curtis and premiered in 2005, French composer Éliane Radigue’s hour-long Naldjorlak exists at the instrument’s limits—at the threshold of resonance and its disappearance. The result is what Radigue calls, “a wild and frail, versatile and volatile world of sounds” that pierces through to an intense intimacy. Performed in Studio 2, this performance is a rare opportunity to experience this intensity up-close.

Ticket holders are invited to a reception after the performance.

Program

• Naldjorlak (1963)
• Éliane Radigue

In the context of the Ephemeral Organ series, Steffani Jemison revisits a recent performance work combining sculpture, movement, and narration to create a new iteration for video.

Composer and artist Raven Chacon are in residence in EMPAC Studio 2 with San Francisco-based experimental music duo The Living Earth Show to begin preliminary recording for a new work to premiere in fall 2025.

Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon return to further develop their video collaboration, Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings (2022), from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

As part of the Ephemeral Organ series, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY’s residency investigates the mutual possibilities of technology and body to track, mediate, and generate a theatrical experience through trigger mechanisms and machine learning.