Every day, Greenland loses 600 million tons of ice. Most people cannot perceive this. Sound artist Felix Deufel and video artist Lucas Gutierrez made it tangible—as sound, space, and embodied experience.

Lost in Liquid Noise is an immersive audio-driven experience based on two Arctic expeditions (2023 & 2024). It reveals the hidden sonic and visual dimensions of climate change—from glacier ruptures to underwater ecosystems beneath frozen seas.

At the core of Lost in Liquid Noise is noise as both a physical and metaphorical condition—environmental overload, continuous transformation, and loss of control. Water shifts between ice, liquid, and vapor, reflecting an unstable system. In its immersive audio installation at EMPAC, the audience moves through evolving sonic textures, from subtle crystalline movements to massive glacial ruptures and underwater acoustic ecologies. The experience oscillates between microscopic detail and planetary scale, fragile stillness and overwhelming intensity. Rather than explaining climate change, the work makes it directly perceptible as a spatial and physical experience.

ABACUS is a large-scale multimedia presentation inspired in part by Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope (a planned data visualization device that would comprehensively model the Earth’s “vital statistics,” historic patterns, and future projections) and by two dominant forms of persuasive discourse today: TED-style presentations and megachurch media design.

ABACUS features a charismatic lecturer, Paul Abacus, aided by the Geoscope and a chorus of Steadicam operators, who argues the obsolescence of national borders and proposes their dissolution. ABACUS serves as an interrogation of the art of persuasion as a catalyst for cultural evolution, examining the moment that data—distilled, visualized, spun—yields a visceral, rather than merely conceptual, impact.

At EMPAC, Director Lars Jan and his team of designers and programmers worked on creating their Geoscope, an array of curved projection surfaces which displays visuals generated from archived and real-time geographical, environmental, and financial data culled from governmental agencies and public datasets on the Internet. Additional residencies developed the integration of two Steadicam operators and live imagery into the piece.

Everyone in Troy knows the river. Few know what lies beneath it.

Night falls over Troy. An unnatural fog rises from the Hudson, extinguishing every light. From within the mist comes the desperate signal of a steamboat, but no vessel can be seen.

Local legend tells of a steamer destroyed by a mysterious explosion more than a century ago, its burning wreck drifting for days before sinking beneath the waters. Sailors whispered it was no accident—something ancient emerged from the fog, claimed the ship, and has waited below ever since . . .

Now the fog has returned. And it’s calling for a new crew to enter the depths.

Will you follow it Beneath the Hudson?

Inspired by Troy's maritime past, EMPAC transforms local history into a supernatural adventure for one night only. Be part of the story as you journey through the haunted remains of the lost vessel. You’ll encounter ghostly sailors, forgotten lockkeepers, strange river creatures, and the relentless pull of an unseen guide. Uncover what happened on board the ship, and see if you can escape the curse before it claims you, too.

The adventure spills throughout EMPAC with Halloween festivities for all ages. Trick-or-treat through the building, pose with a treasure trove of theatrical props from Proctors Theatre, and grab a spooky snack at Evelyn’s Café. Halloween movies screen all evening, while Troy’s FlagSSSDay Collective leads a hands-on craft activity and brings out regalia from its legendary Crow Procession (keep an eye out for crows flocking throughout the party!). Make masks for the party that can also be worn at the Crow Procession on December 12th. 

Before the night is through, cheer on the costume contest with guest judges—or take the stage yourself. After the kids head home, the lights go down and the party gets darker with a DJ and cash bar.

• HAUNTED SHIP EXPERIENCE
• Journey through the haunted remains of a lost ship. This immersive experience is recommended for ages 9 and up.
• SPOOKY SNACKS AND PROCTORS THEATRE PHOTO BOOTH
• Grab a bite to eat or a movie theater snack to keep you going all night. Beer/Wine bar opens at 7PM. Capture the moment at a selfie booth decorated by EMPAC’s designers and a treasure trove of props from the historic Proctors Theatre.
• HELLSEEKER CLUB DJS: RACHEL RAVE + 100 PSYCHIC DREAMS
• Troy’s own NO FUN Goth Night DJs Rachel Rave and 100 Psychic Dreams team up to bring the evening closer to the dark side as the hour grows later.
• CHILL OUT SPACE
• If the festivities get to be too much, this quiet space with cushions, couches, and lamp light bring some cozy autumn vibes and sensory rest.
• MASK MAKING WITH FLAGSSSDAY COLLECTIVE
• Join the iconic FlagSSSDay Collective for a hands-on mask-making craft activity—wear your mask tonight or save it for the next Crow Procession on December 12. While you’re at it, check out regalia from past Processions on display.
• TRICK-OR-TREAT
• Fill your treat bag at tables hosted by local businesses and RPI student clubs and learn more about their activities!
• KIDS COSTUME CONTEST
• Strut your stuff on stage for this kids-only costume contest with special guest judges and prizes from Capital Region candy shops!
• MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND (Rated G, 1996)
• Grab a movie theater snack from Evelyn’s Café on Level 5 and catch this G-rated gloriously weird pirate adventure on the big screen.
• ADULT COSTUME CONTEST
• Strut your stuff on stage for this adults-only costume contest with special guest judges and prizes from Capital Region candy shops!
• LAKE PLACID (Rated R, 1999)
• Grab a movie theater snack from Evelyn’s Café of Level 5 and catch this R-rated creature-feature on the big screen.

*Contains strobe effects 

The lingering afterimages of bright lights on our retinas after we move into darkness, the sonic echoes of a passing car’s thundering bass, the hallucinations that emerge just before sleep—our bodies preserve the residues of lived experience in strange, unexpected ways. More acutely still, some beings experience a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity, or a "death rally”: an unexpected, deeply unreliable resurgence of vitality at the threshold of death.

In Terminal Lucidity, artist P. Staff casts these elusive phenomena back into our bodies, in collaboration with lighting designer Josephine Wang, composer Lukas Frank, animator Adam Sinclair, and programmer Joseph Stewart. An algorithmically randomized constellation of moving image, light, and sound ensures that no two encounters unfold in the same way. The single-channel video work extends out from the screen, shimmering behind our eyelids and drumming in our ears.

Originally conceived for the galleries and elliptical staircase of the Complesso dell'Ospedaletto—a Venetian care home founded in 1527 for the sick and dying—Terminal Lucidity at EMPAC is its first presentation in the United States. It inhales and exhales through eerily biochemical fields of saturated color, punctuated by rhythmic cycles of light and darkness. Likewise suspended between ascent and descent, sensory overload and uneasy calm, the soundtrack shifts abruptly between orchestral fragments, field recordings, muffled room tones, and distant reverberations. Terminal Lucidity leaves us with an unsettling question: if our bodies remember even after the known world disappears, can we relinquish control?
 

Sound is our first sense. Before birth we encounter the world through vibration, developing an embodied understanding of relation long before language. Vibrations of sound move through air, water, skin, and bone, crossing boundaries with ease. Sound is both immaterial and deeply physical: an event continually unfolding between bodies and environments.

At EMPAC, Untitling transforms the listening space into a site for reflection on how sound exceeds systems of categorization. Through careful attention to resonance, vibration, and environmental detail, the installation proposes listening as a practice of reciprocity—one that foregrounds our entanglement with the living world and opens possibilities for experiencing place as dynamic, interconnected, and continually becoming.

Developed through recordings gathered in exchange with forests, waterways, grasslands, deserts, and urban environments, the composition dissolves distinctions between environmental sound and synthesis. Electronic frequencies emerge not as simulations of nature but as another living presence within a shared ecology of vibration. Rather than documenting place, the work proposes listening itself as a form of placemaking.

Composed of field recordings and voice altered through playback, as well as synthesis, Untitling invites audiences into an evolving sonic environment where sound becomes a way of sensing ecological interdependence, memory, and place beyond the limits of language. Fragments of place emerge, dissolve, and return, inviting listeners to inhabit duration rather than resolution.

In these shifting resonances, Untitling imagines sound and acoustic ecology not as representation, but as an active participant in shaping right relations between bodies, technologies, and the living world.

As you listen, imagine each being inhabiting its most abounding state. Consider what becomes possible when listening is understood not as observation, but as reciprocity. Consider how sound and listening become a means of tending, remembrance, and return.

How are our bodies formed by the shifting ground that holds us up? How do we reshape and reform over time? How are we aligned in space and time with the environment around us?

Beyond EMPAC’s glass walls, the horizon converges with printed and projected natural landscapes inhabited by a being that is both body and stone. In this site-specific, multi-channel video installation by collaborators and co-parents Meg Foley and Carmichael Jones, the shifting presence on screen becomes a vortex of gestational and geological time: Foley performs “rock drag,” embodying geologic processes by mimicking a boulder’s sped up evolution through movement while hidden beneath layers of fabric. Responding to the histories of the natural terrains where the footage was shot, the figure becomes both a character within and a physical extension of the landscape—a singular body that is deeply organic but never fully human.

Installed across multiple levels of EMPAC’s glass enclosed bridges, photographic stills printed on stretched lycra become projection surfaces, multiplying the figure so it can be seen from several vantage points as well as close-up within the bridges themselves. The sounds of Foley’s body in motion—heartbeat, breath—form an ambient soundscape, blurring the intimacy implied by the fabric-covered body with the expansiveness of the surrounding landscapes. The result is a meditation on queer gestation, selfhood, geology, and transformation, inviting a slower pace of attention and an expansive sense of scale.

Why do we choose to move in unison—to relinquish individuality to collectivity? What harmonies become possible in group movement, and what are its limits? Can difference and distinction persist within bodily sameness?

The Oath traces a fictional and incomplete history of unison movement as the desire to become a single body. Over a nearly 24-minute film, screened on a continuous loop, it captures the power of mass gesture across a spectrum that ranges from the communal to the monstruous. Dressed in identical, unidentifiable white uniforms and staged within Alla Kovgan’s sweeping direction, a large ensemble of dancers perform Annie-B Parson’s precise cycle of poetic and vernacular gestures. Their movements encompass both utopian and dystopian choreographies of community, clan, club, army, congregation, and machine.

In EMPAC’s vaulted concert hall, the film’s abstract, colorful landscape becomes both larger than life and unsettlingly claustrophobic, calling attention to the spatial patterns the group forms within the contained world of the frame. As the dancers move in perpetual unison, individuality flickers, at once starkly visible and dissolving into the group. The Oath stages collective gesture as bond and bind, promise and battle, celebration and intimidation—at once ritual, rehearsal, and dance.

How are we implicated in the images of power that surround us? How do our actions mimic what we have learned from those that lead us?

Greeting visitors at EMPAC’s main entrance, this interactive sculpture premiere invites us to embody and witness the gesture of the “heroic” death: a dramatized cycle of falling and rising that has long served as a symbol of nationalist ideals. Kate Ladenheim draws on, while sharply critiquing, the formal conventions and political assumptions of monumental sculpture to create an anti-monument that repurposes military materials and trigger mechanics.

Provided with a set of “score” instructions, participants become a part of a system of rising and falling bodies. The sculpture requires not just a single participant but variations on a collective action: people falling on mats activate the rise of an inflatable torso atop a pedestal covered in bullet casings. Without the viewers’ performance of self-sacrifice, the figure of power remains inert and deflated. Together, participants physically rehearse this trope of monumental proportions, revealing how “heroic” figures are constructed, and how many bodies are required, invisibilized, or lost in the process of holding them up. 

Can we hold our relationships to one another as sacred? How do we respond to our environment and effect change? What can we build together from a faltering world? 

At once a sacred mountain and a social microcosm, this sensitive interactive environment—constructed from the detritus of imperialism—invites visitors to build the responses that might carry us home. Meant to be collectively inhabited, Raft is an emergent space inspired in part by Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a painting that frames the horrors that unfold when human lives are treated as expendable. Whether arriving alone or as part of a group activation, visitors are invited to take action, to gather, to take stock of who is present, and consider what must be done. 

In this installation premiere, Yanira Castro and team—including Kathy Couch, RPI alum Stephan Moore, Ariel Lembeck, LD DeArmon, and access doula Marielys Burgos Meléndez—craft a world meant to be felt and moved through, where visitors engage with the actions of others who came before. Intimate voices can be heard embedded inside the installation, interwoven with sounds from Castro’s archipelago origins. Here, participants can contribute to this expanding archive of recorded stories, sharing their own early memories of soil and dirt. 

Open Hours and Group Activations are different experiences. Visitors can do either or both. During the group activations on Thursday and Friday, the installation closes for a participatory experience led by the artist. RSVP is required; the activation begins at listed start times and lasts roughly 75–90 minutes.

For both the installation and group activation, consider wearing comfortable clothes and closed-toed shoes, along with anything else you would wear to freely play. You are encouraged to bring any support elements you typically use in your active life, such as reading glasses.

Accessibility

Raft integrates accessibility practices like low-sensory hours, a care toolkit to navigate the installation, and live Audio Description (AD) for blind and visually impaired people (upon request). Request access

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.