TROY, N.Y. — On Saturday evening, chilly and foggy here, a small group of people stood at the edge of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus and gazed up at the looming facade of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.

Ghostly black-and-white images of stars and planets, culled by the artist Rosa Barba, appeared while recorded voices emerged from loudspeakers, some of them musing on astronomy, some discussing philosophy. The conversational patchwork moved from parsecs to Italo Calvino.

Encompassing units of astronomical measurement and Italian literature is just the kind of thing that this enormous building was created for. The Priem Center, known as Empac, opened in 2008 with a mission to explore the blurring boundary between the arts and sciences — both, after all, engaged in the work of experimentation and the examination of perception.

To that end Empac’s four performance spaces were equipped with an impressive range of multimedia and technical capacities. Led by its director, Johannes Goebel, the center’s curators have attracted artists eager for the time and resources to do work that might raise eyebrows elsewhere.