By Peter Jacobi
Outside, it was snowing again late Friday afternoon. Inside, a crowd had ignored the elements to gather for an intriguing audio/visual event. They gathered in the Grunwald Gallery of the fine arts building on Indiana University’s campus to experience “Dark Zone,” a work of Aaron Travers and Arthur Liou.
The two gentlemen are faculty members, Travers in composition at the Jacobs School of Music and Liou in digital art at the Hope School of Fine Arts. Their collaboration resulted in a 15-minute exploration of sounds and sights suggesting the ocean deep.
The sounds — eerie, mysterious, fragmented, dissonant — were scored by Travers and played by members of Dal Niente, a Chicago-based ensemble, established to give a cluster of talented musicians a chance to practice their craft and to promote new music through commissions and performance. The sights — of creatures existing in sunless black — were created by Liou through computer generation and cast on walls of the darkened gallery by seven projectors.
Whether Travers’ music would please me if played alone in a concert venue, I do not know (though I have my doubts). But as part of a package, with Liou’s images of bioluminescent creatures swimming in a cleverly conjured alien environment, the score was spot on.
With the project, Travers meant to bring attention to our real-life invasion, through fishing and trawling, of the depths, while giving musicians an opportunity to do what they do without benefit of comfortable lighting and offering attendees an immersive concert experience to remember. He’s met his own challenges. And Liou should feel awfully good about his accomplishment; he shaped another world in that gallery.
I’ll remember the occasion and am glad I braved the snow.
© Herald Times 2014