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The Jew of Malta

In 2002 Berlin interactive agency art+com created an interactive stage design for the Munich Opera Festival. The design included costume projection by cross-sections of virtual architecture projected as clipping planes onto large, angled projection screens. This architecture was generated in real-time and contingent not just on the music but also on the position of the protagonist (Machiavelli). This relation allowed the linking of story and architecture on stage.

The costumes, too, were computer-generated: a specially developed tracking system produced digital masks in real-time and projected “media costumes” with precision onto the singers. The dynamic costume textures open up the inner realms of the singer to the imagination of the viewer. The goal of the project was to take the stage set on from its classical, static incarnation towards a reactive and dynamic design that plays its own vital role in the opera, bolstered by the dramatic storyline.

The Evolving Opera

Jorge Orta began this mixed media work in 1996 and it will evolve and grow in length until 2006. Based on interdiciplinary collaborations, 3 generations of artists are invited to create a module for the open-ended composition: music scores, dance sequences, sculpture, light and video projections. The federating theme is the heart = Life, the creative idiom from both a symbolic and Human perspective. Its complex mythology renders the symbol poetic. The Babylonians designated the heart the center of intelligence and memory. For the Egyptians it represented the terrestrial support for the soul. Hypocrite refer to the heart as the intelligence organ. Plato believed the heart was the center of feelings and passion. For Aristotle the heart transformed food into blood and was the emotional centre. Its universal nature helps to converge cultural, social, religious differences and from a scientific angle it exposes a new vision of a medical problem.

Delerium

Delerium is created and directed by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon. A multifaceted event of unprecedented proportion, it features the Cirque du Soleil music remixed.  Driven by an urban tribal beat and awe-inspiring visuals, musicians, singers and dancers transform the arena into joyous frenzy.

The Augmented Body

Stelarc the Monograph
Stelarc is the most celebrated artist in the world working within technology and the visual arts. He is both an artist and a phenomenon, using his body as medium and exhibition space. Working in the interface between the body and the machine, employing virtual reality, robotics, medical instruments, prosthetics, and the Internet, Stelarc's art includes physical acts that don't always look survivable -- or, as science fiction novelist William Gibson puts it in his foreword, "sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality."

La Reve in Vegas

According to the Las Vegas Sun, it’s “visually stunning.” Created by internationally acclaimed director Franco Dragone, Le Rêve at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas is a spectacular show housed inside a domed theater-in-the-round, complete with a 1-million gallon pool as its centerpiece. Adding to the spectacle are ethereal water-based lighting effects enabled by intelligent LED lighting. The theater’s circular design incorporates a series of lifts that rise and sink, forming a dynamic “stage” for the performers. The central pool reflects colored light that sets the tone throughout the show.

Zero Gravity

Multi-disciplinary artist Laurie Anderson was trained as a fine artist, sculptor and painter, but her work spilled into dance, music and performance art. At the focal point she is a poet who builds multimedia textures around her words. In 1983 she completed her first large theatrical scale work, United States, a 4-part multimedia performance of song-texts. Bringing together a unique blend of spoken word, large scale projections (in collaboration with media artist Perry Hoberman), keyboards, microphone (delivering her voice through her trademark sound effects), quirky movement, Cheshire smile, and sly eye contact. In 1995 she explored the interactive medium, creating the CD-ROM Puppet Motel in collaboration with multimedia artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Puppet Motel is divided into 32 rooms, small vignettes based on previous works and trademark Anderson motifs: clock, airplane, plug socket, telephone, and other objects of technology. Puppet Motel is a new form of music-theater where the audience is on stage, controlling the flow of time and space in zero gravity.

Einstein on the Beach

Out of the ferment of the 1960s, Robert Wilson brought performance art to Wagnerian scale in the 1970s with his epic "visual operas." Originally trained as a painter, Wilson was frustrated with the images in his head that were so much richer than anything he could get on canvas. Together with his collaborators who varied from the autistic child Christoper Knowles, to musical celebrities David Byrne and Jessye Norman, to some of the great artists of our time including poet Allen Ginsberg, composer Philip Glass, and playwright Heiner Muller, Wilson created an inexplicable music theater experience from the integration of non-narrative drama, scenic spectacle, music, sound, silence, and dance.

Influenced by the work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Wilson's concept of visual theatre set movement and staged events free in time and space, as the surrealist writer Louis Aragon declared, "an extraordinary freedom machine." Large scale works such as Einstein on the Beach and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud were biographical sketches of the mind, generating for the spectator an "intuitive" experience drawn from suggestive actions, slow-motion, and repetitive, non-sensical texts. Unlike the linear flow of time in traditional theater, Wilson's music-visual interface frees the spectator, allowing the mind to freely explore and participate, "rather than the usual virtuoso tools used to project some play's predetermined energies and meanings." When Einstein on the Beach was given its American premiere at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1976, the two principal collaborators, Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass were totally unprepared for the impact this work would have on the contemporary performing arts. Based on the creative genius of Einstein, and his fascination for numbers, technology, music, and philosophy, the four hour "science-fiction opera" includes a trial, a steam locomotive, and a futuristic spaceship. Contrary to traditional opera, there is no linear narrative, no orchestra in the pit, the libretto is replaced with numerical and syllabic counting, while a small instrumental ensemble supported by electronic keyboards is placed right on stage. robert wilson

John Cage

As a musician, composer, artist, poet, and philosopher, John Cage's work rarely fit within the traditional boundaries of artistic practice. In the late 1940s, during a residency at Black Mountain College, he developed his provocative "theater of mixed-means" in collaboration with the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham. These experiments gave birth to an explosion of performance art in the1950s and 1960s that introduced all types of actions, artifacts, noises, images, and movement into the performance space, such as in his own electronic theater work, Variations V from 1965. The anarchic nature of Cage's work, with its bold acceptance of indeterminacy (chance) as an integral part of its composition, later encouraged the composer to extend this new found freedom to include the participation of the audience. Cage, inspired by Zen Buddhism, revels in an anarchy that dethrones the artist as the heroic, all-powerful arbiter of creative expression. He proposes instead a shift to an inclusive, participatory art that encourages interaction between artist, performer and audience.

John Cage made Variations V in 1965 for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He and David Tudor settled on two systems for the sound to be affected by movement. For the first, Billy Klüver and his colleagues set up a system of directional photocells aimed at the stage lights, so that the dancers triggered sounds as they cut the light beams with their movements. A second system used a series of antennas. When a dancer came within four feet of an antenna a sound would result. Ten photocells were wired to activate tape-recorders and short-wave radios. Cecil Coker designed a control circuit, which was built by my assistant Witt Wittnebert. Film footage by Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik's manipulated television images were projected on screens behind the dancers. The score was created by flipping coins to determine each element and consisted of thirty-five remarks outlining the structure, components, and methodology. The specific sound score would change at each performance as it was created by radio antennas responding to the dancers' movements. In this photograph Variations V is performed for a television taping session in Hamburg. The photocells were located at the base of the five-foot antennas placed around the stage. Cage, Tudor, and Gordon Mumma operate equipment to modify and determine the final sounds. The project was also presented at the Philharmonic Hall in New York, 1965. john cage

Performance Art

Fluxus artist Dick Higgins describes a branch of American post-modernism from the 1960s that reflects the tumultuous social atmosphere of the era and its impact on the arts. Higgins attention is focused on Intermedia, a myriad of emerging genres that spilled across the boundaries of traditional media. In the interseces between the arts, mixed-media forms coalesced: Happenings, performance art, kinetic sculpture, electronic theater, as well as a variety of deliberately uncategorizable works – such as in Philip Corner's Piano Activities and his own Danger Music #2 from 1962. Following the example of Marcel Duchamp, Higgins suggests that artists explore the territory that lies between "the general area of art media and those of life media." He calls for unusual combinations of art, including, for instance, the mixing of painting and shoes. With Intermedia, any available object or experience can be incorporated into the artwork. performance art

Theatre of Totality

The Bauhaus art school existed in four different cities Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, Berlin from 1932 to 1933 and Chicago from 1937-1938, under four different architect-directors Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933 and László Moholy-Nagy from 1937-1938). These changes of venue and leadership meant a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, for instance, although it had been an important revenue source, the pottery shop was discontinued. When Mies took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it. Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy undertook a wide range of aesthetic investigations, using the school as a laboratory to examine the formal principles of abstraction in painting, photography, and sculpture. He also explored the influence of technology, which had a profound impact on his work.

These experiments led Moholy-Nagy to develop a new kind of theater based on these principles. Underlying this approach was an effort to synthesize the theater's essential components – space, composition, motion, sound, movement, and light – into a fully integrated, abstract form of artistic expression. Moholy-Nagy referred to this idea as the theater of totality, a reinterpretation of Wagner's concept of total theater. Moholy-Nagy's approach to the synthesis of the arts reduced the importance of the written word and the presence of the actor, placing them on an equal plateau with stage design, lighting, music, and visual composition. This interest in formal integration included technology, which is reflected in his use of mechanical motifs in his work in other genres such as painting, photography, film and sculpture. moholy-nagy