The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) has announced its spring 2017 season. The nation’s most technologically advanced university performing arts center, EMPAC commissions, develops, and premieres new time-based artworks born at the intersection of physical and digital spaces.
Jan. 27 and 28 at 8 p.m.
Following several years of development through EMPAC’s artist-in-residence program, media-dance pioneer Charles Atlas will premiere his new two-part work, Tesseract. A collaboration with choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, Tesseract is a six-chapter work of science fiction combining stereoscopic 3-D video with live dance.
January 17
Media scholar Anna Everett kicks off the season’s lineup of free talks with Digital Tribalisms: Millennials, Hashtag Activism, and the New DIY Movements.
February 1
Sarah Juliet Lauro offers a talk and video game demo titled Kill the Overseer! Playing the Rebel Slave in Videogames.
Feb. 10 at 8 p.m.
Choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili channels the long history of Nigerian women’s social movements—including the Bring Back Our Girls campaign—into the multimedia dance production Poor People’s TV Room.
February 16, 17, and 18
EMPAC music curator Argeo Ascani and audio engineers Todd Vos and Jeff Svatek will lead a series of introductory demonstrations using EMPAC’s new Wave Field Synthesis audio system. The 496-channel system is capable of very precise sound spatialization and is an emerging platform for electronic composition.
February 23 at 7 p.m.
Choreographic duo Gerard & Kelly will offer a free work-in-progress preview of their project Modern Living on The duo is in residence to translate a series of live dance performances into a gallery installation using video projection.
March 1
In its second season, the Watering the Flowers film series will continue to highlight the work of current EMPAC artists through three evenings of screenings. Boudry / Lorenz will screen work by themselves and others to contextualize their current film project being created in residence.
March 3 at 8 p.m
Iranian hand-drumming virtuoso Mohammad Reza Mortazavi will perform a rare U.S. concert in the EMPAC Concert Hall.
March 23
Isabelle Pauwels takes us into the spectacle of mixed martial arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, central to her feature-length film project currently in production. And on
March 27
EMPAC teams with the Rensselaer School of Architecture for Some Kind of Joy: The Inside Story of Grimshaw in Twelve Buildings, a documentary film and discussion with the architecture firm that designed EMPAC. On March 29, media scholar Susan Kozel considers the effect of dance improvisation on human-computer interaction with When Performance and Philosophy Become Design Materials: Dialogues Between Dance and Interaction Design. And on April 19, EMPAC director Johannes Goebel will consider the relationship of math and music throughout Western cultural history in The Construction of Beauty: Music and Math.
March 30
Obie Award-winning artist Andrew Schneider will present a work-in-progress preview of FIELD. Currently being developed through the artist-in-residence program, the project will integrate projection mapping and 3-D sound spatialization to create an immersive environment within a nonlinear narrative.
April 12
Choreographer Mary Armentrout will lead a dance workshop titled From Feldenkrais to GoPro, blending body-awareness techniques with technological mediation.
April 18
Violin superstar Anne Akiko Meyers will perform a concert of new and repertoire works with piano accompanist Akira Aguchi and the famed 1741 “Vieuxtemps” Guarneri del Gesu violin.
April 24
Mariam Ghani will screen films from the Afghan Film Archive for her ongoing project, What we Left Unfinished.
April 25 at 5 p.m.
Dancer Trajal Harrell will offer a free performance of The Return of La Argentina, which mixes the dance styles of vogue and Japanese butoh.
For tickets and further information, visit empac.rpi.edu. For press and academic inquiries, contact Josh Potter at pottej2@rpi.edu.