MEDIATHEK

The Demo is an electronic opera by composer/performers Mikel Rouse and Ben Neill. The piece is inspired by the remarkable story of computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart’s prophetic vision of a world interconnected through personal computers. His 1968 demonstration in San Francisco rolled out virtually all that would define modern computing including videoconferencing, text editing, and something called a "mouse." Using emerging digital technologies to explore live performance with sampled media and original music, The Demo reveals the origin of computing and the internet as a unique hybrid performance event. It was premiered at the Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University in April 2015.

Using the original 1968 video as a 100 minute sample, The Demo depicts Engelbart dreaming forward and backward, evoking memories of his personal journey and visions of where his ideas would lead. A gentle, dreamy character with a utopian vision, Engelbart pursued his idea that computers could augment human behavior as a crusade. His lab at Stanford in the 1960’s was a unique blend of Bay Area countercultural types with computer scientists, NASA and military personnel. Engelbart participated in early LSD experiments conducted by the US Department of Defense, and was seen as an outsider by other computer scientists of his era.

The set mirrors the event as it happened in San Francisco in 1968 as well as the remote site in Menlo Park that is seen in the original video. The remote team is represented by a group of actors/singers on a platform above and behind Rouse and Neill. Throughout the piece the text and code from the original demonstration become the libretto, literally turning Engelbart’s computer code into poetry.

The keyset used by Engelbart has been repurposed so that Rouse can send MIDI control for audio and video. Musically, the work combines elements of the era in which Engelbart’s demo took place with contemporary digital sounds. Influences from late '60s experimental fusion are mixed with complex electronic beats, Neill’s futuristic electro-jazz and Rouse’s richly textured vocals. The work culminates by depicting the overload of information in the current digital culture through a series of animations and visualizations of the internet created with the eDream Institute/National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.