EMPAC presents a pair of work-in-progress performances, featuring Corin Sworn and Clarissa Tossin

TROY – During the Fall 2019 season at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, two work-in-progress performances will offer audiences a glimpse at new productions currently in development at the center. On Thursday, October 17, Corin Sworn will discuss her choreographic experiments with surveillance algorithms that purport to recognize “suspect” movements and gestures; on Thursday, November 7, Clarissa Tossin will introduce her research into pre-Columbian wind instruments and demonstrate the 3D-printed prototypes she has developed.

Working with domestic surveillance systems that claim to “tell a person from a thing,” Glasgow based Canadian artist, Corin Sworn is in residence at EMPAC with two dancers. Using movement in order to test the “black-box” of the surveillance camera system, Sworn will choreograph a performance-installation that deliberately glitches the technology to reveal the system design. Through experimentation with frame-rate, speed, lighting conditions, and gesture, the artist utilizes the language of rehearsal to produce an aesthetic encounter that frames how these apparatus codify what is deemed neutral or natural.

Los Angeles based Brazilian artist, Clarissa Tossin is in residence with Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta and Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhaes to develop the score for a new EMPAC-commissioned moving image artwork. Working with 3D-printed versions of these traditional instruments, which are held in US and Guatemalan museum collections, Tossin will discuss and demonstrate the prototypes she has produced in collaboration with anthropologist/archaeologist Jared Katz, the Mayer Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow for Pre- Columbian Art at the Denver Museum. This new work not only explores the sonic potential of traditional Mayan forms to resituate Mayan Revival buildings in the context of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architectural lineage, but also reveals the ways in which this lineage is continuous in the cultural hybridity of contemporary Mayan communities in Los Angeles.

The free events offer audiences a look at new productions currently in development through EMPAC’s artist-in-residence program

For more information, please visit empac.rpi.edu. For press inquiries, please contact Dorothy Dávila-Evans at davlid@rpi.edu.