The Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) presents the first-ever "laptopera". The Furies: A Laptopera is a retelling of the Greek tragedy Electra. Blending a number of versions of the Electra story including works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Jean Paul Sartre, this retelling explores central questions regarding how communities escape from cycles of violence, the role of guilt and shame in community identity, personal responsibility, how justice interfaces with cycles of violence, and redemption. The artistic medium of the laptop orchestra both serves to recast the traditional instrumental role in a new kind of operatic medium (the “laptopera”) that reimagines the potential of instrument building to support dramatic elements and character relationships—while simultaneously positing questions about technology in our lives presently, both in its promise to help us flourish and in its perils to perpetuate and amplify the existing cycles of violence in our world today.
The laptop orchestra is a large-scale, computer-mediated ensemble that explores cutting-edge technology in combination with conventional musical contexts—while radically transforming both. This unique ensemble format comprises laptops, human performers, controllers, and custom multi-channel speaker arrays designed to provide each computer-based instrument with its own acoustic identity and presence. The orchestra fuses a powerful sea of sound with the immediacy of human music-making, capturing the irreplaceable energy of a live ensemble performance as well as its sonic intimacy. At the same time, the orchestra makes use of the computer’s capabilities to experiment with sounds, instruments, and new forms of musical expression. Offstage, the ensemble serves as a unique laboratory and classroom that explore music, computer science, interaction design, composition, and live performance.
Read more about laptop orchestras:
full excerpt from Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime
The Furies: A Laptopera is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Furies: A Laptopera must be made payable to "Fractured Atlas" only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
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