As part of the lively experimental music and performance downtown scene of the 80’s, Ericka Beckman has made acclaimed works across Super-8mm, 16mm, and expanded cinema formats since the 1980’s. Engaging live-action choreographed sequences, as well as handcrafted layered animation, and face paced soundtrack, Beckman transforms the cultural norms communicated through common-place material such as fairytales and games.

Beckman is highly revered by contemporaneous peers and collaborators. She has influenced the generations that follow her in numerous ways, especially in  relationship to what she describes as “the performance of the image”.

This screening and discussion will draw on Beckman’s longstanding exploration of how physical action, and our memory of it, constructs cultural images and influences both our behavior and perception of reality.

From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.

If all life is conducted from within the same finite mass of resources, then everything we know is from a recycled lineage of the same matter in different forms expressing different things at different times. In this way it is all the same and also different. Our temporary variance in the play of matter is part of a long history of making and unmaking, seeing and not seeing, being and being-with. Set within a soil landscape, Conducting Life explores the plural existences of gorgeous microbes as they live through the process of metabolizing their own homescape. 

Apprehend the flux of all the same matter in EMPAC’s Studio 1 celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation (1926). Multi-generational microscopic communities documented with novel high-resolution photography are combined with ambisonics and Wave Field spatialization of Stein’s essay to produce an ever-evolving state and psychedelic status of all the same matter, differently. Become consciously aware of microbial contemporaries who are conducting life just as we are conducting our own lives on this singular planet.

When infertility threatens mankind with extinction and the last child born has perished, a disillusioned bureaucrat (Clive Owen) becomes the unlikely champion in the fight for the survival of Earth's population; He must face down his own demons and protect the planet's last remaining hope from danger.

GameFest is an annual showcase of student talent in game development, bringing together students from around New York State and the Northeast to exhibit their games.

The GameFest awards recognize excellence in game design, technical innovation, artistic quality, and narrative design, and are awarded by a panel of expert judges from game studios in the Capital Region.

In addition to the games showcase, this year includes: 

• film screenings and a talk by visiting artist Ericka Beckman
• a keynote talk from Karthik Bala, CEO and co-founder of Velan Studios
• and a retro gaming lounge presented by RPI's Interactive Media Archeology Lab

Please join us as we celebrate the future generations of game designers!

Date: Saturday, March 28, 2026
Hours: 12:00 PM - 7:00 PM

This interactive experience explores how engaged social practice can serve as a methodology for collective research and restorative community building. Through facilitated invitation, inspired by the work of Pauline Oliveros (musician, humanitarian, and founder of Deep Listening), participants explore presence and play, cultivating capacity for orientation to what is emerging in this moment. This work positions the body as our wise collaborator, a friend that we welcome, as is, into our practice.

Jane Rigler is a musician whose lifelong performative practice has transformed into an invitational social practice that promotes play, connection, and imagination as embodied research. With foundations in flute performance from Northwestern University (B.M.) and experimental music from UCSD (M.M., Ph.D.), Jane’s international career spans performance, composition, education, and facilitation. As an international performer and composer, her works explore movement, languages, and ancestral songs, and are featured worldwide at electronic music festivals and on various labels. Jane’s artistic journey includes prestigious residencies (Civitella Ranieri, Montalvo, Ucross) and international research, from studying Noh theatre during her US-Japan Friendship Fellowship to exploring Irish (Gaeilge) traditions on a Fulbright Award. As a (former) Associate Professor at the University of Colorado (2010-2024), she taught flute, composition, computer music, sound art, and co-taught interdisciplinary humanities studies courses that embedded listening practices as ecological consciousness and collaborative creations.

Presented in partnership with the Rensselaer County Regional Chamber of Commerce, this free, family-friendly event invites you to celebrate the season with music, community, and festive refreshments. The concert will feature performances by the RPI Orchestra, Concert Choir, and Wind Symphony, including works by Smetana, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, Lauridsen, and Saint-Saëns.

Registration is required.

The Rensselaer Music Association is delighted to present our Fall Showcase Concert in the EMPAC Concert Hall on November 13th at 7PM. Six of our groups will be performing an exciting selection of music spanning across all different genres. From classical wind ensemble to jazz and rock & roll, there will be music for everyone to enjoy!

Ensembles:

Symphonic Band, Flute Choir, Clarinet Choir, Trumpet Troupe, Dirty Work, Collar City.

FREE and open to the public!  

The Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has named the founders of Ecovative Design the 2025 recipients of the William F. Glaser ’53 Entrepreneur of the Year award. The honorees, Eben Bayer ’07 and Gavin McIntyre ’07, will be recognized for pioneering the use of biodegradable mycelium-based materials in construction, fashion, consumer packaging, food and more.

Established in 1990, the Entrepreneur of the Year award honors Rensselaer graduates who have achieved success as entrepreneurs and now serve as role models for current students and aspiring entrepreneurs. The annual honorees bring the world of entrepreneurship into the classroom by sharing their career experiences with students. 

The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place on Nov. 6 at 1 PM in the EMPAC theater on RPI’s campus. In addition to the awards ceremony and a fireside chat with RPI President Marty Schmidt ’81, the event will include a startup pitch competition and poster presentations by RPI students and faculty. Pitch and poster topics include a wide range of products, from healthcare and e-commerce to energy and space technology. 

Full news release

Natan Diacon-Furtado's Community Portal is an open-source ancestral projection and transmission tool. It engages the public in embodied collaborative listening through the re-purposing of naval navigation and paranormal investigation technologies. A water-filled metal bowl is modified to become a ground-plane liquid antenna, engaging the FM radio spectrum as a space for investigation and recuperation of community connection(s). Connecting this antenna to a laptop converted into a software-defined radio “spirit box” allows a hand placed into the water to audibly modify the signals that are received. Additional hands placed into the water merge and amplify the antenna's signal, sharing agency and intention between you, your community, and your watershed, opening a space for joyful meaning-making and the potential to receive site and self-specific messages from other(ed) ancestral imaginations.