SOCIAL ACTIVITIES
Poéme électronique: the Virtual Electronic Poem project
11/9/2007, 18.00The Poème électronique was an unique experience, originating from the request made by Philips to Le Corbusier to design the company pavilion at the Brussels 1958 World Fair. The whole project was initiated and directed by Le Corbusier, who also selected the images for the audiovisual show. Together with this visual show, there was the organized sound, composed by Edgar Varèse and delivered through 350 loudspeakers distributed in "sound routes", and the stunning surfaces of the building (hyperbolic paraboloids), designed by Iannis Xenakis. The result was the very first multimedia project to create a complete sound and vision experience using a totally immersive environment, since the space of the Pavilion hosted the audio and the visual materials as integral parts of the architectural design. Unfortunately, this visionary synthesis was ahead of its time, and the concept was never repeated or even attempted again: the Pavilion, the incredible number of visitors (2 million) notwithstanding, was demolished a few months after its inauguration, at the end of the Exposition. The destruction of the Pavilion turns the Poème ‚lectronique into a lost masterpiece and represents a serious blow to the cultural world, in particular for the European culture, since it was designed and realized by Europeans (with the partial exception of Varèse, who was born in France, studied in Italy and Germany, but was USA resident). Today, we are left with fragments of the various components, such as photographs and drafts of the architecture, the projected video from the Philips archives and the recordings of Varèse's and Xenakis' music. All these materials are publicly accessible, and technological advances in virtual reality, computer graphics and binaural audio make a rebirth of the Poème ‚lectronique possible. The goal of the Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) project, co-funded by the European Union through the Culture 2000 programme, is the realization of a virtual reality (VR) environment, capable of reproducing the global experience of the Poème ‚lectronique through a philologically accurate reconstruction of the original installation and a technologically innovative VR implementation, which is effective both in the visual and the auditory domain (using stereoscopic vision and binaural audio). Starting from the available historical sources (the control score of the visual show with handwritten annotations by Le Corbusier at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the initial control score available from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, a fragment of the control instructions for audio routing on the 350 loudspeakers published in the Revue Technique Philips, the Philips Company photographic archives, albums and catalogues of the '58 Expo, original audio tapes at the The Hague Conservatorium), it has been possible to recreate the audiovisual show in all its components (the electronic music by Varèse and by Xenakis, the film by Le Corbusier and Agostini, light ambiances designed by Le Corbusier and Kalff, light effects - tritrous, sun, moon, stars, lightning, clouds) and to stage it inside a computer graphics reconstruction of the Philips Pavilion. The VR installation gives the user a renowned fruition of the Poème ‚lectronique and an interactive application on the web allows to access the virtual scenario and the multimedia show through the Internet, thus contributing to a large scale dissemination of the project' s results.
Concert of Classic Music
11/9/2007, 19.00Ensemble Collegium Artis
Giorgio Matteoli, flauto dolce
Sonia Romano, violoncello
Annalaura Cavuoto, clavicembalo
Musiche di Fontana, Bach, Frescobaldi, Scarlatti e Marcello
Il concerto è effettuato con il contributo della Provincia di Roma, ed è inserito nel ciclo "Musica in Villa 2007"
Social Dinner
12/9/2007The social dinner will be served at Ristorante Cacciani in Frascati.
Inquiries to: aiia07@info.uniroma2.it