Stanford Live presents the Demo featuring Ben Neill & Mikel Rouse
2015-04-01
Bing Concert Hall
Stanford University, 327 Lasuen St, Stanford, CA
7:30 PM, Wednesday, April 1, 2015

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[7:33 PM lights down, announcements by Wiley Hausen]

1. [7:38 PM] ?
2. [7:47 PM] ?
3. [7:56 PM] ?
4. [8:07 PM] ?
5. [8:09 PM] ?
   [set ends ~8:15 PM]

[8:24 PM; lights down]

1. [8:25 PM] ?
2. [8:35 PM] ?
3. [8:42 PM] ?
4. [8:52 PM] ?
5. [9:01 PM] ?
6. [9:05 PM] ?
   [show ends ~9:10 PM]

[~9:12 PM to ~9:40 PM]

• Ben Neill: mutantrumpet, composer;
• Mikel Rouse: composer, conductor;
  others TBD.

Although tonight's event started out as a relatively straightforward recreation of Douglas Englebart's famous 1968 demonstration of the possibilities of an interactive computing system, it veered off into an art-noise-overload as the event wore on. This made for a peculiar tension in my experience, as I wanted to follow the more logical, formal demo than the improvised sound and light show being cooked up on top of those bones. Because the original event was exceedingly well documented (heck, it's even on YouTube!), it seemed to me to be somewhat arrogant of the creators to decide what was worthy of sharing with us (grocery lists?) versus what was less important (collaborative scheduling). But that's how it works with artistic vision, and as an audience member, one has to grant that artistic license can be expressed in many ways, of which some are bound to vary in their ability to wow a crowd or capture our attention. So while I might sound a little grumpy, I'm actually totally OK with the event, as I got to witness the debut of a pretty spectacular piece of modern theatre.

Sitting through the Q&A session afterwards, it was kind of funny to note how the questions and answers seemed to zing off in all sorts of directions, much like the show! Made me think this portion of the evening was a recreation of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, filtered through the Telephone game. Or the Sermon on the Mount scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. In retrospect, it seemed to me like this was a missed opportunity – a chance for the performers to have engaged in some collaborative use of technology with the audience. Oh well, maybe next time!

Surprisingly, despite all the advance notice about this show, the only actual review I could turn up belonged to the Stanford Daily. It's interesting to note that the event was newsy enough to warrant that advance mention, but not actually worthy of any sort of attention from our current collection of media outlets – a sad commentary on the state of that system!

• Program Notes
• Stanford archival material
• ArkType
• San Francisco Classical Voice
• Santa Cruz Sentinel
• Stanford Magazine
• Venture Beat
• John Markoff's promo for the New York Times
• Benjamin Sorensen's review for the Stanford Daily

Back to the previous event ☸ Up to the 2015 yearbox ☸ Up to the 2015 event list! ☸ On to the next event!