The Meta-Orchestra: research by practice in group multi-disciplinary electronic arts

Abstract

Group multi-disciplinary projects face difficult challenges in social collaboration, diverse technologies and aesthetic grounds. Combining sound, image and space into a sufficiently malleable set of materials for creation is a complex task. As such projects lack a common ground from which to start, an experimental, practical approach is suggested, with a non-hierarchical, informal group structure. The Meta-Orchestra project, tackling these problems since 2000, re-engaged with the issues in a fourth meeting in Maastricht in 2004. This paper lays out the context of multi-disciplinary work, influenced by developments in computer technologies, by outlining the changed roles of the orchestra, the score and audio-visual theories. The Meta-Orchestra is described against a theoretical frame of social, technical and aesthetic considerations. Although the project will not be forced into this framework, descriptions of the palette, the strategies to create common grounds, the areas opened up by wireless network technologies, aesthetic issues of layering sounds and images, and the development of a central score system, illustrate the layered complexities of the Meta-Orchestra.