What does the museum experience sound like, and how can curators and artists expand the possibilities of art spaces through the technical and temporal frameworks of media and performance? Throughout her career, curator and creative producer Vic Brooks has sought to answer these questions through a series of innovative exhibitions and projects that blur the boundaries between the visual, performing, and sonic arts, and that engage deeply with the spaces in which they are displayed.
In this talk, Brooks traced a throughline across projects that play with the boundaries of their disciplinary frameworks, demanding new curatorial approaches and renewed attention to architectural contexts and their unheard legacies. During her eleven-year tenure at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)—an institution designed for the production of time-based arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—Brooks commissioned artworks and developed a series of projects that consider the acoustical properties of the sound stage, concert hall, and museum. She focused on Shifting Center, a 2023 exhibition she co-curated at EMPAC with Nida Ghouse, and contextualized this work through a discussion of two additional projects: Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1954) at the Central University of Venezuela’s Aula Magna, which is the subject of Brooks’ co-edited volume Tuning Calder’s Clouds (Athénée Press, 2025); and Clarissa Tossin’s Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ (2022), which traces a sonic lineage from pre-Columbian Maya wind instruments and Indigenous Guatemalan architecture to Maya Revival design and the contemporary concert hall.
A version of this video with ASL interpretation will be available soon.
