UMaine Intermedia Students Present the Collaborative Work MCRCSM
Contact: Nate Aldrich, nbaldrich@earthlink.com
ORONO — Five University of Maine students from the Intermedia Master of Fine Arts program will present the collaborative multimedia work, “MCRCSM,” April 18, from 6-10 p.m. at the Cyrus Pavilion Theatre on the Orono campus.
MCRCSM, which is free and open to the public, re-envisions a 1969 media event, “HPSCHD,” by 20th century avant-garde and experimental music composers John Cage and Lejaren Hiller. At the time, HPSCHD, a reference to the harpsichord, was a monumental multimedia production utilizing 80 slide projectors, 52 tracks of audiotape and live performers.
MCRCSM at UMaine will be an interactive multimedia installation that combines ideas present in the original piece with contemporary notions of emergent complexity. Multiple speakers and video projectors will generate a myriad of altered sights and sounds, reshaping them as the night goes on from information gathered via audience input.
Cage and Hiller used chance-based operations and technological representations of changes in scale to articulate their world view. MCRCSM updates the original piece by taking current ideas, technologies and the contemporary audience into consideration.
MCRCSM, which means microcosm/macrocosm, is a collaborative work by students Bethany Engstrom, William Giordano, Alexander Gross, Ryan Page and Abigail Stiers.
For more information on the Intermedia MFA Program, visit the program website (www.intermediamfa.org) or contact: Owen F. Smith, director of the Intermedia MFA, at ofsmith@maine.edu, or call (207) 581-4389.