The Ascent, Interactive installation/ride, Opens At EMPAC

EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer), TROY, NY: The Ascent, an interactive installation/ride created by xxy (artist Yehuda Duenyas, Theater Director, NTUSA) debuts Thursday, May 12th at EMPAC (corner of 8th St. and College Ave. in Troy, NY). Ride open to the public from 10am-5pm with demonstration at 7:30pm.

Mashing up a playful blend of theatrics, gaming and mind control, The Ascent is a live theatrical ride experience created for anyone to try. Individual riders wear an EEG headset, which reads brainwaves, along with a waist harness, and by marshaling their calm, focus, and concentration, try to levitate themselves thirty feet into the air as a small audience watches from below. The experience is full of obstacles-as a rider ascends via the power of concentration, sound and light also respond to brain activity, creating a storm of stimuli that conspires to distract the rider from achieving the goal: levitating into "transcendence." The paradox is that in order to succeed, you need to release your desire for achievement, and contend with what might be the biggest obstacle: yourself. For more information on The Ascent visit: xxyprojects.com

Creative director: xxy
Lighting design: Ben Kato
Sound design: Jody Elff
Programming and control systems: Michael Todd
Produced in conjunction with EMPAC and the Rensselaer Department of the Arts

More specific technical information, photos, and video available upon request.

About xxy:
xxy is artist Yehuda Duenyas. He creates venues, events, productions, and systems that reenvision how audiences engage with live experience. His work has been presented nationally and internationally, and with an extensive background as a theater artist and director, he has custom-built numerous venues around New York City and abroad, including a jewel-box theater in a downtown storefront, an indoor amusement- park-style ride in a Brooklyn warehouse, and a scale model of an early 20th-century vaudeville theater in the basement of a deserted deli off Times Square.

He is currently conducting research in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he is developing a new body of interactive performance systems that fuse playful tropes of theater with experimental gaming, simulation, engineering, and cognitive science.

He is a founding member and co-artistic director of the multi-award-winning theater collaborative the National Theater of the United States of America.

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