Rucyl Mills has built a wearable MIDI device, a solar-powered sound installation, and, in her current project, a score translating gravitational data from galaxy clusters into sonic frequencies. On September 10, she comes to EMPAC in Troy for Quantum, the inaugural event in EMPAC’s Interface series, in conversation with IBM quantum physicist Chris Lirakis.
About the Show
Quantum is an artist-scientist dialogue — a one-hour talk (6 to 7 p.m.) that uses quantum physics as a lens for understanding uncertainty. Mills and Lirakis will explore how artists and scientists approach what EMPAC describes as “phenomena beyond ordinary perception — including states of possibility, emergence, vibration, and unseen forces.” The organizing question: what happens when research becomes creative practice and creativity becomes a form of investigation?
Mills brings a practice shaped by Philadelphia’s underground music scene and the influences of 70s soul, 80s dancehall, 90s hip-hop, and Sun Ra — a lineage she channels into experimental compositions that fuse noise art, bass waves, sample collage, and avant-garde R&B. She co-founded Saturn Never Sleeps, an improvisational audiovisual collective inspired by Sun Ra, and has developed interactive sonic experiences including a wearable MIDI device and a solar-powered sound installation. She is the 2025 Hermitage Greenfield Prize winner; the $35,000 commission funds a notational score investigating humanity’s relationship with cosmic superstructures, translating waves of pressure and gravity into sonic frequencies using Quipu data from a recently discovered string of galaxy clusters.
Lirakis serves as Senior Manager of Engineering for Novel Computing Architectures at IBM. He spearheaded the IBM Quantum Experience platform, a cloud-based system that opened quantum computing experiments to researchers and the public in 2016, enabling applications in areas from lattice gauge theory calculations to financial market simulations and chemical dynamics modeling. Curator Dena Beard shaped the evening’s program. Refreshments and informal conversation follow at Evelyn’s Café.
Venue & Logistics
EMPAC, RPI’s experimental arts center, is one of the more genuinely unusual venues in the capital region. It runs programming that moves between the arts and sciences with equal fluency, which makes it a natural home for the Interface series. Quantum takes place in the EMPAC Concert Hall in Troy. The Interface series, of which this is the first installment, runs through November 12, 2026; expect more evenings in the same mode of cross-disciplinary inquiry.
Tickets
Admission is free. The event runs 6 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 10. Event details