Humanity’s ever evolving relationship with technology comes with equal parts optimism, equal parts dread. Will the rise of the machines release us from the burden of work or remove the need for humanity? Does new technology enable freer and more open communication or just make us slaves to a surveillance state? For his new piece Hybrid Spectacle, Knut Vaage explores these tensions through asking the musicians of BIT20 Ensemble to play with a hybrid of acoustic and electronic sounds.

Classical musicians who normally play acoustically will have the small, unheard sounds of their instruments enhanced through powerful electronic processing. Others will be given small transducers – vibrational speakers that create oscillations – to transform various materials into sounding objects. On top of this acoustic-electronic sound world Knut Vaage and his team merges light, laser and video to build a multilayered interconnected experience, a creative loop where one element feeds another.

This Hybrid Spectacle uses the human to human dialogue that is at the heart of collective music making to question how communication shifts as technology becomes more prevalent, and in a techno-future, how we can all change and adapt to new hybrid environments.

Picture: “Utopolis #9”, Silje Heggren, 2018, acrylic on canvas.

Presented in collaboration with BIT20 Ensemble.

Commission supported by Arts Council Norway, The Audio and Visual Fund, Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, Morten Eide Pedersens minnefond, Bergen Centre for Electronic Art, Avgarde and BIT20 Ensemble.