Lars Jan doesn’t make theater that lets audiences watch from a safe distance, and on February 11 he arrives at EMPAC in Troy with MIT technologist Talis Reks to talk through the project that takes that further than either of them has gone before: an outdoor immersive performance linking forty untethered headsets across a stadium field so every participant inhabits the same virtual world at the same time.
About the Show
INTERFACE: Mixed Reality is the latest event in EMPAC’s ongoing INTERFACE series, curated by Tara Aisha Willis. The format is a talk from 6 to 7 p.m., featuring two speakers whose collaboration spans the divide between live performance and XR technology.
Jan is the founder of Early Morning Opera, a performance and art lab exploring “emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience.” He serves as Head of Directing at CalArts, with works including Holoscenes, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), and Slow-Moving Luminaries appearing at the Whitney Museum, BAM Next Wave Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and festivals from Sydney to Montreal. His honors include a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, TED Senior Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship (2022), Creative Capital Award (2021), and the Audemars Piguet Art Commission.
Reks brings the engineering perspective. He manages the MIT.nano Immersion Lab and co-founded DreaMR Labs, an XR development studio built around real-world applications of immersive technology. His background spans XR work at Harvard University and research in biomechanics, human behavior, and physiological monitoring. Reks has noted the lab’s scope “extends well beyond research and into art and the performing arts.”
The centerpiece is ROAM, an outdoor immersive performance being developed at EMPAC that synchronizes untethered headsets for forty bodies moving across a stadium field simultaneously. The questions they will work through in conversation: “Can a group of people occupy the same imagined world at the same time, in the same physical space? How can we share experience through mixed reality?” In their framing, the goal is to merge “mixed reality, narrative, and live performance—at stadium-sized scale.”
Improvisation and failure are built into how the XR architecture gets tested. That framing tells you where this project sits in its development — and makes the conversation worth showing up for in person.
Venue & Logistics
The talk takes place in EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman at RPI’s experimental arts center in Troy, part of the Capital Region. EMPAC programs work you are unlikely to find anywhere else in upstate New York. Refreshments and informal conversation follow at Evelyn’s Café after the 7 p.m. close.
Tickets
Admission is free. Buy tickets