Ephemeral Organ is a series of residencies, performances, and talks by artists whose work explores choreography and bodily motion as technologies for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience. Each artist simultaneously navigates the ever-shifting nature of live performance and the urge to retain, return to, and generate traces of the past.

The word ephemeral suggests short-lived objects, activity that leaves residual evidence, and brief but intense durations. Archival materials not designed to be preserved but which are still potently present are often called ephemera. The word organ hints at the body and its parts, a series of interior vessels and chambers which intimately order—or organize—our modes of living. In dance and performance, bodies are often understood as having inherent archiving functions. Archives are spaces of public record, systems which give purpose to what we want to keep; our bodies hold experience, gain knowledge, recall behaviors, track gestures, and mediate infinite possible actions each time they move.

Interpreting archival materials, mining family memories, recording movement through technology—each Ephemeral Organ project holds past and present side by side, inseparably. Each of the artists has developed distinct choreographic devices through which performers can compose history through their bodies and which allows them to generate, keep, and even at times lovingly lose, a bodily record of their actions.

The series begins with residencies and talks in the fall of 2024, including with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY and collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, as well as series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

On April 17–18, 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the series culminated in the Ephemeral Organ Festival—a weekend of performance, installation, and artist talks, including with Leslie Cuyjet and Steffani Jemison.

In this performance and video installation, Marina Rosenfeld makes the American premiere of her commissioned work μ (mu). Louis Chude-Sokei accompanies the artist on transacoustic piano and Ben Vida performs alongside Rosenfeld during the event. Titled after the mathematical term for friction or touch, and inspired by the artist’s longstanding interest in turntablism, the work takes place along the surface of a dubplate at the moment of inscription.

In μ (mu), Rosenfeld has figured the dubplate (a one-off, hand-cut record) as a distinct audiovisual landscape—here, it is a scene that stages sonic and visual events activated by friction. Rather than merely playing the digital audio embedded in the record, μ (mu) explores surface phenomena along the material of the dubplate itself, capturing footage and images at an incredibly small scale as it traces the path of a sculptural stylus designed by Rosenfeld.

μ (mu) engages both sound’s material conditions and, through the work’s focus on touch, its social aspects. Rosenfeld has also composed a score—in part from the video's own mise-en-scene—which integrates turntable sounds and recordings that play with noise, analog synth, and forms of abrasion.

This presentation of μ (mu) includes a piano performance with a Yamaha transacoustic piano, expanding the work's exploration of the entanglement of acoustic resonance with digital sound. A transducer piano resonates any sound sent through it, digital or acoustic.

The EMPAC installation also imagines μ (mu)’s acetate dubplates as a counterpart to traditional film (of which acetate is also an important component), proposing the project as a point where the materiality of image-making, sound, and touch collide. 

Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century) is a performance jointly authored and performed by filmmaker Bassem Saad and writer Sanja Grozdanić that opens up a complex grammar of mourning in the face of impersonal, legal accounts of collective grief. The piece contends with the temporal, political, and intellectual fallout of so-called post-conflict societies beset by imperialist violence in the 20th century. Its plot centers on two traveling eulogists who encounter one another in a declining architectural estate. They must contend with the sense of an ending–of an epoch, of a revolution, of a regime.

Over the course of the performance, the project's characters gradually open up a dreamlike grasping after the principles of revolutions and their failures. Riffs off official political stances rupture suddenly into unfettered expressions that ride collective affects of public feeling and dissidence. The work touches on parallel histories--such as the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia and ongoing crises in and around Lebanon--as it shifts between the openly tragic and the melancholically absurd. What starts out as a formal reflection on a sort of "professional mourning" eventually unravels into a very different sort of historical reckoning.

This version of the performance, commissioned by EMPAC, expands the artists’ original script-based work to encompass a new sound score, film material, and additional experimental projection. Reflecting the artists’ iterative working method, this presentation includes material from their in-progress film of the same name, plus archival footage.

The artists approach this expanded version of Permanent Trespass as a cinepoem, building on avant-garde techniques for merging the sensibility of poetic writing with the possibilities of cinematic footage.

EMPAC building tours take visitors behind the scenes to experience the center’s infrastructure as few do. Each one is hosted by an EMPAC staff member with a different area of expertise—so whether you attend one or all this season, there’s always something new to learn and discover.

Join us! EMPAC Tours are offered at no cost and begin in the Main Lobby. Please plan to arrive 15 minutes before tour start time. Each tour runs approximately 90 minutes.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 AT 1PM
WITH ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR JONAS BRAASCH

Join Jonas Braasch for a tour highlighting the center’s architectural acoustics and learn how the EMPAC panorama screen system led to the development of the Rensselaer CRAIVE-Lab (Collaborative Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment).

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 AT 11AM
WITH CURATOR KATHERINE C.M. ADAMS

Join Katherine C.M. Adams for a behind-the-scenes look at EMPAC’s production facilities. Adams will discuss the acoustic and visual potential of each EMPAC venue for the making of complex performance works, including artists-in-residence Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić’s upcoming Permanent Trespass.

NEW DATE! SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 AT 11AM
WITH ENGINEERS STEPHANIE VAN SANDT & ERIC BRUCKER

Each of EMPAC’s performance spaces were designed as a blank canvas, endlessly customizable according to the needs of EMPAC’s diverse productions. Join Director for Stage Technologies Stephanie Van Sandt and Lead Video Engineer Eric Brucker for a behind-the-scenes tour of all the nuts and bolts that make the space work, and learn about how technology and creativity meld in collaboration with artists in the creation of new work.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 AT 11AM
WITH SENIOR NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR DAVE BEBB

Join Dave Bebb for a tour from an information technology perspective. With miles of fiber optic cable linking all four venues as well as the audio and video recording facilities, EMPAC is an environment where physical and digital worlds seamlessly intersect.

Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad share their artistic collaboration through a combined short screening program and artist talk. Over the past three years, Grozdanić and Saad have been jointly developing Permanent Trespass, a performance work dealing poetically with collective mourning and the fallout of imperialism and violent conflicts.

This script-based stage piece is now being expanded, in the spirit of a cinepoem, into a performance at EMPAC that incorporates new sound design, archival footage, and material from the in-progress film of the same name.

In their screening program and talk, the artists discuss their collaboration and current interests in connection to filmmaking: memory, mourning, the cultural fallout of conflicts in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia, and performance & dramaturgy.

The presentation will also feature a series of films that converge on thematic or formal grounds with Permanent Trespass in its various versions, selected jointly by the artists for this occasion.

Filmmaker Sharlene Bamboat shares her film project Both, Instrument & Sound during this event, which includes a viewing of the feature-length film, a look into a new installation-in-progress, and a moderated discussion.

Originally made as a 40 minute, 1-channel film, the work offers an intimate and sensorially rich perspective on shifting practices of solidarity and alliance-building. Refracted through the life of 80-year-old Tony, an activist in Toronto’s queer community, the work opens up to both political and intimate modes of relation.

In its filmic material, sound score, dialogue and theme, Both, Instrument & Sound dwells in forms of tension, touch, and friction as it explores the potential of collectivity against the backdrop of rising neoliberalism.

Bamboat has described Both, Instrument & Sound’s method as “tension as an aesthetic strategy.” Its sound score combines an array of sonic interpretations of tension, collaboratively developed with musicians and the film participants.

In a moderated discussion after the screening, Bamboat and her collaborator Kaija Sirala speak about developing the multi-screen version of the work while in residence at EMPAC.

Bamboat provides context on her larger practice and discusses the considerations involved in shifting a work made for theatrical viewing into an installation. Bamboat also speaks to the means she uses to consider solidarity and collective struggle in this work and past projects such as If From Every Tongue it Drips (2021) and The Wind Sleeps Standing Up (2016).

In this talk, artist Constantina Zavitsanos speaks about their artistic practice. Zavitsanos’s work ranges from sculpture to performance, and deals with debt and dependency, entropy, thresholds of perception, incapacity, and modes of sensing and feeling. Zavitsanos’s work is deeply sensitive to the infrastructural possibilities and limitations of any exhibition environment. In their pieces, accessibility strategies are often also sculptural strategies or filmic gestures. Tools like open captions can offer, in the artist’s words, a “backstage pass” to previously unseen aspects of a work.

All the same, for Zavitsanos, obscurity is not necessarily to be avoided. In the artist’s work, debility is often simply a material condition, and Zavitsanos regularly engages materials at the point where they frustrate or challenge our perception. Experimenting with artistic production in relation to insights from physics, some of Zavitsanos’s past works consider what cannot be sensed, or engage phenomena of interference. The artist’s Call to Post & All the Time, on view in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, features an “infrasonic ramp,” a large inclining surface that vibrates with frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.

Zavitsanos’s practice unfolds both independently and, occasionally, in collaboration with others. Peers they have written with, performed with, or developed work with include Park McArthur, Carolyn Lazard, and Amalle Dublon.

Dana Michel’s experimental choreographic work MIKE deploys an unexpected logic that unravels the orderly world of mechanical labor. Accompanied by an inventory of office items, which appear sculptural yet also act as performance collaborators, Michel embarks on a series of tasks subject to interruption and absurd redirection. Michel moves her body and these disparate objects nomadically through the margins of theatrical space and the given architecture, upending their typical function. Both playful and serious, MIKE deals with work culture and self-respect. Michel asks: “is it possible to live public lives that reflect our inner selves?”

Michel’s MIKE is an ever-shifting work that updates in response to each architectural space it is presented in. At EMPAC, the piece’s itinerary shifts between one of the building’s most technologically advanced spaces (Studio 1) and some of its seemingly most simple and public—such as lobbies, stairwells, and an outdoor patio. Where apparently straightforward infrastructure becomes entangled in subtle, comic gestures, the finish of theatrical production is surrendered to the physical and emotional complexities of maintenance. At issue are the everyday performances we undertake at work.

MIKE is a three-hour, durational performance. Viewers can move around the performance spaces as needed to follow the work. While audiences are encouraged to stay from start to finish, viewers are free to enter and exit the performance as they like.

a gift horse’s mouth features five short films by various artists that address relationships between the body, mechanical labor, and market forces. Taking its title from the timeworn saying “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” the films offer critical artistic accounts of technological economies that ask how the financialization of technical resources impacts the possibility for agency over our bodies and time.

Daughter of Dog by Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen considers the fragility of the body in the face of violence; questions of weaponry, the presence of a robotic dog, and a pulsing, part-electronic score lend the piece a technological undercurrent.

In We Hold Where Study by Wu Tsang, inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s writing on the dangers of a logistical imagination, dancers perform a four-part choreography amid shifting landscapes: the assembly line / the algorithm / the consultant / the state of war.

Ho Rui An’s 24 Cinematic Points of View in a Factory Gate in China examines how the common cinematic motif of workers leaving the factory has shaped the labor film genre in the US, the USSR, and China.

Filmed entirely in the videogame Battlefield 5, Total Refusal’s How to Disappear attempts desertion from within the game’s militarized logic, seeking ambivalent, anti-war positions inside the software’s rigid structure of play.

Bahar Noorizadeh’s operatic Free to Choose, made with theatrical choreography, animation, and uncanny 3D graphics, catapults us into a future in which time travel is a market force and financial solvency requires loans from one’s future self.

Program

• Daughter of Dog (2024)
• Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen
• We Hold Where Study (2017)
• Wu Tsang
• 24 Cinematic Points of View in a Factory Gate in China (2023)
• Ho Rui An
• How to Disappear (2020)
• Total Refusal
• Free to Choose (2023)
• Bahar Noorizadeh

Decommission features film, visual art, and movement-based projects that enact critiques of antagonistic infrastructures. Decommissioning refers to the practice of removing equipment or infrastructure from service. Often applied in a military context to retired weaponry, here, decommission plays against the idea of an artistic commission. Decommission’s featured projects exist in relationship to debt, material lack, and breakdown, rather than surplus and optimization. In spite or because of such depletion, these works exhibit rigor without regimentation, agility in the face of inaccess.

Dana Michel’s performance MIKE focuses on labor. The film program a gift horse’s mouth considers the impact of technology and its economy on the body. Constantina Zavitsanos’s talk concerns debt and dependency as it factors into their sculpture and performance practice. Together, these programs allow for inquiry into themes that are central to contemporary art, media theory, and other fields that engage with new media--such as the potential for technological innovation to be yoked to militaristic agendas; and whether artistic critique is possible under conditions of extreme financialization.

In Decommission, artists consider what is left of techne (instrumentality, technique, production) after obsolescence, destruction, or financial hardship puncture our sense of technology. Watching tools shift from vectors of innovation to compromised social artifacts, featured artists engage aesthetic methods that remain attentive to the physical fragility and social vulnerability of media.

–Katherine C.M. Adams