Since 2005, EMPAC has invited nearly 40 national and international artists to develop new works in residence. With the support of EMPAC’s staff, and grounded in its exceptional venues, artists in residence work on projects in all stages of development. For Process Boxes, twenty-three alumni from EMPAC’s artist in residency program have contributed representations of their time at EMPAC, resulting in an archive of process materials and artifacts of artistic production.

• Toni Dove
• Marites Carino
• Wayne McGregor | Random Dance
• Peter Flaherty
• Nuria Fragoso
• Sean Griffin
• Volkmar Klien
• Lars Jan
• Mads Lynnerup
• O+A
• Graham Parker
• Lisa Parra and Sophie Kahn
• Michael J. Schumacher
• Workspace Unlimited
• Keiko Courdy
• Daniel Teige
• The Light Surgeons
• Robert The representing Maryanne Amacher
• Jean-Francois Peyret
• Movement Research
• Thom Kubli
• Jennifer Tipton

Dancing on the Ceiling: Art & Zero Gravity, is a major group exhibition in which contemporary artists explore—and on occasion recreate—the condition of weightlessness on earth. The exhibition will present the work of multiple national and international artists, including three newly commissioned pieces for the exhibition. Distributed throughout the public spaces in the building the exhibition is itself un-tethered from the confines of the traditional gallery exhibition paradigm.

Arts Catalyst • Benjamin Bergmann • Denis Darzacq • Edith Dekyndt • Chris Doyle • William Forsythe • Julia Fullerton-Batten • Thom Kubli • Tomás Saraceno • Jane & Louise Wilson • Xu Zhen

» ONLINE EXHIBITION CATALOG «

Dancing on the Ceiling will bring together artworks that use the metaphor of floating or weightlessness as an expression of the relationship of the individual to social, political or personal contexts. In addition, several of the pieces relate to lightness as akin to an agility of mind, freed of entrenched perspectives.

Occupying EMPAC’s Studio 2, Jane and Louise Wilson’s four-channel video installation Stasi City is a psychological investigation of the former headquarters of the East German secret police, culminating in a moment of escape. Xu Zhen’s In Just a Blink of the Eye poses individual actors as if caught in a moment, defying gravity and time. The two video works that comprise William Forsythe's Antipodes I/II constitute a study of destabilizing habits of bodily movement in relation to gravity.

The artworks in the exhibition deploy helium, parabolic flight, rigging, and digital effects. They feature floating performers, an upside-down kitchen, an isolation tank and skateboarders freed from physical laws. They evoke the golden age of space exploration and the dreams of the counter-culture. Dancing on the Ceiling is a provocative convergence of time-based photography, sculpture, installation, and video.

Curated by Kathleen Forde, Curator of Time-Based Arts, the exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalog including essays by Italo Calvino as well as interviews with commissioned artists Chris Doyle and Thom Kubli.

Related Events:

Inhabiting Other Worlds: Microgravity, Perception, Physiology, and Design
A panel organized by the School of Architecture at Rensselaer with Rachel Armstrong, MD, Heidi DeBlock, MD, Ted Krueger, and Deepak Vashishth, PhD marking the opening of a student exhibition resulting from a studio dedicated to designing a medical station for a NASA lunar module.

Unfiction Series: Man On Wire
An Academy Award-winning documentary about Phillipe Petit’s daring and defiant tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, which became known as the “artistic crime of the century.”

Extraterrestrial Medical Workstation
Students from the School of Architecture and Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer imagine a medical center on the moon, in an exhibit of design studies commissioned by NASA’s Habitability and Human Factors Branch. These design proposals anticipate the clinical and research protocols that will be used on the moon, and perhaps beyond. The best of them will be incorporated into a full-scale prototype lunar module that will be tested in the Arizona desert in August 2010.

DOUGLAS TRUMBULL 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
A talk with special effects legend Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner) followed by a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of science fiction cinema on the massive 56’ concert hall screen.

In collaboration with Marije Baalman, Harry Smoak, Vincent de Belleval, Justine Chibuk, Thomas Spier, Duncan Swain and Brett Bergmann In Just Noticeable Difference (JND), Chris Salter ratchets down the level of sensory information to the threshold of the perceptible. On entering the installation the visitor is immersed in an environment of near-total darkness, insulated against external sound and vibration. Sparked by an array of sophisticated built-in sensors and devices that emit micro-levels of tactile, auditory, and visual feedback, the slightest motions cause this environment to respond, though so subtly as to test the limits of both perception and interpretation. The result is a revelatory aesthetic experience in which noise shifts towards order, sensation becomes sense, and the apparent randomness of threshold sensory impressions gives way to a new understanding of meaning in the relationship among body, self, and external world. On Thursday, March 4 at 7 PM in the Theater, Chris Salter and Rensselaer faculty Michael Century, Mark Changizi, and Ted Krueger with other experts will all take part in a panel discussion on topics including thresholds of perception, multi-modal perception, and the use of research in art practice.

As NASA renews its quest to build settlements on the moon, and eventually on Mars, it is commissioning a series of design studies for the components of such settlements. The challenge of designing a lunar medical center fell to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Architecture and Department of BioMedical Engineering and its students. Now the results of that design studio are on display in “Inhabiting Other Worlds,” an exhibition of schematic studies for an “ER in a box” meant to operate beyond earth orbit. Developed under a commission from the Habitability and Human Factors Branch at NASA/Johnson Space Center in Houston, these visionary design proposals anticipate the clinical and research protocols that will be used on the moon, and perhaps beyond. The best of them will be incorporated into a full-scale prototype lunar module that will be tested in the Arizona desert this August. “Extraterrestrial Medical Workstation” is a scientific response to the same problems that inform the artworks on display in “Dancing on the Ceiling,” which is running concurrently in EMPAC’s public spaces: How do we visualize the impossible, and in so doing, bring it into the realm of the possible?

Mads Lynnerup has long been interested in the everyday. Now the Brooklyn-based Danish artist, whose last installation was devoted to routines, explores what happens when people depart from those routines, or even disrupt them. In Take a Day for Yourself, Lynnerup enlists random members of the Troy and RPI communities to do just that: take the day for themselves. Whatever happens next is up to them. The rich and inventive uses Lynnerup’s subjects make of the ensuing 12 hours of stolen time are shown on short videos and oversized posters that together make up a whimsical visual guide to taking a day off in Troy—or anywhere else—and to gently subverting some of the fundamental expectations of our society.

Sleep is among the most mysterious of human behaviors, both difficult to portray and resistant to narration. Slow Wave presents works that employ both poetic and empirical channels in an attempt to give form to the amorphousness of sleep, and examines the particular techniques through which sleep is understood. Over three days, visitors will have a chance to view exhibitons by Jennifer Hall, Allan Hobson, Pierre Huyghe, Rodney Graham, Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns, Ana Rewakowicz, and Andy Warhol; attend a performance of Alvin Lucier's "Music for Solo Performer" (by special RPI guests), and revisit milestones in sleep science. In this interdisciplinary commingling of art and science, recordings of brain waves function as drawings or poetic transcriptions and works of art double as experiments.

• Alvin Lucier
• Ana Rewakowicz
• Andy Warhol
• Fernando Orellana
• J. Allan Hobson
• Jennifer Hall
• Pierre Huyghe
• Richard Linklater
• Rodney Graham

New media artist Sophie Kahn and choreographer Lisa Parra present a work-in-progress showing of their video installation, Body/Traces, a 2008-2009 EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission.

Using a DIY 3D laser scanner and stop-motion 3D digital animation to track a dancer's movement through space and time, they are creating a single-channel video to be projected at life-size. The showing is the culmination of a three-week creative residency at EMPAC, and will be followed by an open discussion.

The project Body/Traces explores the female body through 3D laser scanning and structured improvised movement, where the images become alive and what is alive becomes idle, illuminating the physical presence and disappearance of the body. A dancer's body is scanned at various stages of movement, and the resulting images are re-animated in 3D. The result is an imperfect document of the traces left by the dancer’s body in space. The deeper one looks, the less familiar the body becomes, appearing awkward and fragmented. The project looks at the unstable representation of womens' bodies and of movement by addressing the questions: What happens to the body in motion when it becomes a still image? And what becomes of that image when it is returned to the moving body whence it came?

The EMPAC building is the result of an extremely refined combination of architectural design, structural solutions and technological innovation. The very high demands for the program and mission that this building is meant to serve challenged the consultants and contractors to go beyond the tried and the known to find new solutions.

Driven relentlessly by Rensselaer’s vision for EMPAC, these collaborative efforts spanned over more than seven years. These highly charged times resulted in a building that incorporates the distinctive aesthetics of the architect, the innovative strategies by the acoustician, the bridging between traditional and high-tech performance practices by the theater consultant, the rigorous requirements for the mechanical and electrical systems, the complexities of building on a steep hillside, and the constant push for reaching the highest obtainable attention to detail.

The integration of the latest developments in video, audio, networking and theater technology fro creating a truly experimental media and performing arts center added another layer of complexity to design and implementation.

Many of the feats and features of the building do not meet the eye and ear of the casual visitor. And even for the expert many details are hidden.

This exhibition is designed for the pleasure to discover a few details of the truly mind-and-matter boggling complexites of EMPAC.

Those who are interested in more aspects of EMPAC as a unique building and as outstanding example for the integration of architecture, technology and the arts, may look forward to forthcoming publication in January 2009 on EMPAC’s design and construction, edited by Mark Mistur of Rensselaer’s School of Architecture, with contributions by those involved in design and construction, and with architectural photographs taken by Peter Aaron/ESTO.

A presentation on main features of the building will take place on Saturday, October 4th with  Sir Nicolas Grimshaw and William Horgan on the architecture, Larry Kirkegaargd on acoustics in the building and Joshua Dachs on the theater design . On Sunday, October 5th, Johannes Goebel will give an informal talk in Studio Beta on EMPAC.

Men in the Wall is a four-screen 3D video installation where four men, life-size, chat across the boundaries of their own cramped frames, looping through a sequence of poetry, jokes, songs, quibbles, flamenco, and napping. To enter this quirky world, viewers don old school stereoscopic 3D glasses to watch these shared lives, revealing a public quartet of private differences. 

For three weeks, acclaimed lighting designer Jennifer Tipton turned the EMPAC construction site into a dynamic light sculpture, that could be viewed intimately from nearby streets as well as from a distance across the Hudson and beyond. Commissioned by EMPAC, Tipton used recent innovations in lighting to illuminate the EMPAC building. Well known to dance and theater audiences alike as one of the most accomplished lighting designers, this was Tipton’s first site-specific lighting installation. 

In dance, Tipton has collaborated with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jiri Kylian, Dana Reitz, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and Dan Wagoner, among many others; her work in the theater has garnered two American Theater Wing Awards, an Obie, two Drama Desk Awards, and two Tonys.