One of tenets of Buddhism is: ‘We’re all connected.’ A live concert this Friday night at Virginia Tech will celebrate that idea. Faculty from The School of Performing Arts will perform with Musicians in California, New York and Mexico. They’ll all be connected via the Internet and the public is invited.
It always takes a lot of coordination to do any kind of live performance. But this one will span mulitiple time zones with musicians in different locations, their engineering wizards helping create a connection that previously Buddhists could only imagine. And so could people like Benjanmin Knapp, founding director of the Institute of Creative Arts and Technology at Virginia Tech.
“It’s a unique moment and a unique time where we can be in southwest Virginia and be directly connected to Mexico and Stanford and to UCSB.”
Knapp is Master of the “Cube,” a space where arts and science can play together on multiple screens, with a hundred and twenty speakers creating what he calls an immersive sound and visual environment. It’s all connected to a superfast Internet connection known as “Internet Two” specifically for universities.
“So all of a sudden, not just being able to attend concerts but also to being able to perform collaboratively in concerts now becomes ubiquitous, now becomes available to everyone.”
“There will be a large screen..”
Lee Heueremann, Assistant Visiting Professor of voice at the School of Performing arts is coordinating and performing.
“…and all of the different sites will be on that screen.”
The concert, called Imagining the Universe from Music, Spirituality, and Tradition. It’s being performed by these musicians and technicians, separated by physical distance, in honor of Khenpo Sodargye Rimpoche a Tibetan Buddhist scholar. He’ll give a talk from Stanford University prior to the performance. Then he will begin to chant and his chanting will become part of the first piece in the program.
“And having Sodargye Rimpoche here – or almost here –you know at Stanford, and being able to connect to him through this musical experience is going to be very powerful. I think that people who come here, I hope they’ll come with really a very open mind/ Come knowing that you’ll settle in and it won’t be your normal concert experience, where you’ll have the capacity, also to go into a deeper state where you can connect with everyone in that room and these other locations.”
“We talk a lot about things that are transcendent. Things that engineering and science can’t do by themselves that music and the arts can’t do by themselves.”
Again, Professor Benjamin Knapp
“You could only do it when you bring the technology and the arts together and now you can do something like this that’s both part social connection, part performance, part technology and remembering that underlying all of this is the incredible developments in high speed communications and the internet.”
Despite this, technology cannot yet, fully transcend time. The remote/connected concert will begin at 7:30 west coast time, 10:30 here.
The remote concert is this Friday night in the Moss Arts Center Cube, on Alumni Mall in Blacksburg. Lee Heuerman will give a special pre-concert talk at 9:30. Click here for more information and to register for the event.
The event will bestreaming live here.
