Rensselaer’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) marked the midpoint between groundbreaking and opening with a sunset performance around the site on Sept. 8. A crowd of approximately 2,000 — including students, faculty, staff, families, and members of the Troy community — attended the evening presentation that featured local, national, and international performers.

Rensselaer is preparing to launch one of the first undergraduate computer game design programs in the country. Not surprisingly, alumni were making significant contributions to game design before it was even considered a technology field.

In spring of last year, Julia Christensen ’05 tossed a couple of suitcases in her 1999 white Subaru Forester and drove nearly 20,000 miles across the United States. But her road trip of several months was not the sightseeing, soul-seeking excursion of a typical college student. Instead, the multimedia artist traveled coast to coast on a mission to connect communities in the midst of a growing phenomenon: abandoned “big box” buildings that once housed megastores.

After decades of use and years of disrepair, West Hall is emerging as a vital campus building and a base for the arts at Rensselaer.

Rensselaer’s Academy of Electronic Media is developing a first-of-its-kind “mobile studio” for engineering students. Using wireless technology, the studio will allow combined lecture and lab work anywhere on or off campus.

Rensselaer’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences has launched a new game studies minor, an interdisciplinary program shared by the arts and cognitive science departments. The program is expected to expand to include other schools and departments.

Larry Kagan ’68 stands in front of an illuminated wall inside his art studio, housed in a small brown building in an alleyway in downtown Troy. Mounted a few feet above his head is a mesh of thick, rusted wires bent and twisted in countless directions. Kagan asks a visitor what she sees.

Igor Vamos, internationally known multimedia artist and assistant professor of integrated electronic arts, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

For nearly 50 years, research professor of music Pauline Oliveros has been meshing technology with the acoustics of instruments and space to connect her music to the meditative rhythms of her surroundings.

In an effort to bring diversity to the meaning of “home,” Kathleen Ruiz, curator and assistant arts professor at Rensselaer, brought together the digital artwork of nine artists from around the world to create “Imaginary Homelands: Reconstituted Narratives in the Digital Landscape.”

After the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, Colleen Mulrenan waited two days for her father to come home from his job as a deputy chief for the New York City Fire Department.

Rensselaer digital artist Kathleen Ruiz has teamed up with five female artists to create a virtual dancer named “Ava” (short for Avatar).

Seventeen students from the Ark Community Charter School in Troy and from Mills College Children’s School in Oakland, Calif., teamed up to draw pictures together simultaneously through the Web in a first-of-its-kind electronic arts project.

Rensselaer has chosen Johannes Goebel, a respected curator and renowned composer of electronic music, to lead the university’s experimental media and performing arts center.

Diana Slattery, associate director of the Academy of Electronic Media at Rensselaer, has combined electronic art, interactive computer game components, sound, and text to create a Web-based experimental project called Glide. The project is being used around the country by universities teaching courses in electronic literature.

Artbyte magazine’s September/October 2001 “Digital Art School Guide” listed Rensselaer as one of 33 schools around the country whose programs are “hatching new worlds with the latest digital toys.”

Neil Rolnick had just received his Ph.D. in musical composition from the University of California at Berkeley when he joined the Rensselaer faculty in 1980. His arrival marked the first step in a deliberate effort to build at Rensselaer what has become one of the most highly regarded electronic arts programs in North America.