Architectural Designs for the Brain Opera
To me, the Brain Opera posed a particular challenge to integrate
electronic technology into a spatial, tactile, and artistic environment.
Computers, as sophisticated and powerful as they are, are still
trapped in a rather stodgy interface of wires, boxes, and screens. We
are only beginning to create a physical freedom of interaction with
the computer that will someday be completely natural. The first step
towards this freedom (in the Mind Forest) was to create a magical
forest of steel trees that shoves all the boxes overhead, and creates a
field of tantalizing dangling objects that offer explorations and
expressions of musical sound. The environment is a meshing of
physical objects, light, image projection, and acoustics. Raw steel,
silicone rubber, and coated meshes provide the appropriately
material-yet-immaterial stuff of the Brain Opera forest. In the
Performance Space, similar materials are used, and a large
undulating backdrop for image projection is added immediately
behind the grouped performers and their steel trees so that space of
physical and visual interaction for the performers is intensified.
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