For Spring 2022, several groups will have the option of composing a visual piece to be performed as part of the Activated Expanses event on Saturday April 30, 9-10PM. These groups will need to meet separately with students and faculty from the Exploded Ensemble and Activated Animorphs classes to coordinate on the overall design. A well-designed result could work both as a visual composition for daily use on the bridge as well as a performance element during the show.

Event Description

Activated Expanses – an interdisciplinary audiovisual performance event presented by Exploded Ensemble and Activated Anamorphs.

Saturday, April 30, 2022 – 9PM to 10PM EDT

Activated Expanses will be a multimedia performance event combining experimental music, performance art, wearable sculpture, and audiovisual video/light projections.  In our one-hour performance, we will activate the valley below the Randy Pausch bridge with light, color, costumes, and choreography.  The audience will be free to explore the open spaces between the Gates and Doherty buildings as they are immersed in music, visuals, and augmented performances.

About the team:

Activated Anamorphs is an interdisciplinary studio course and temporary wearable sculpture and performance ensemble that presents a hybrid of relationships between prosthetics, movement, and identity-based performance for video, social media, experimental fashion, and live contexts. For our end-of-the-semester live performance, students will design and fabricate performative devices that alter, augment, mask, and transform the body and its inherent abilities. Movement-based performances will be presented on campus in collaboration with experimental sound compositions by the School of Music’s Exploded Ensemble and other guest artists that will activate the winding pathways, public spaces, and areas on and around the Randy Pausch memorial bridge.

Exploded Ensemble is Carnegie Mellon University’s hybrid music research wing, fusing traditional orchestral performance practice with experimental, electronic, multi-media and non-Western approaches to live music performance.  Our multi-sensory performances incorporate live video, computer-controlled lighting, architectural scale inflatable sculpture, wearable technology, and many other intermedia elements.  Exploded concerts have received copious attention from the press and have taken us to some pretty unusual places, including hundreds of feet below the Earth’s surface.  In a review of our recent overnight concert, SNOOZEFEST, the Pittsburgh Post Gazzette described Exploded Ensemble as “one of the city’s most creative musical performance groups.

Proposed collaboration with Interaction and Expression using the Pausch Bridge Lighting:  

We propose to design our work in collaboration with a custom lighting design for the Pausch Bridge that will run throughout the performance.  Our musicians and performers can use the colors and patterns displayed on the bridge as a kind of graphic score, where color and motion provide cues to interpret and sonify.  The animations displayed on the bridge may inform visual choices made in other elements of the performance including costume design, video projection, and temporary light installations that will be presented in the green spaces between Gates and Doherty during the event.