Live piano performance of A. Scriabin's music with interactive visuals projected on the church walls marking the composer's anniversary.
Dedicated to A. Scriabin: 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of composer’s death and the 155th anniversary of his birth.
Pre-concert talk:
Prof. Charles Spence, Crossmodal Research Lab, Oxford University
Prof. Eric Clarke, Music & Consciousness, Oxford University
Prof. Mads Haahr, Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
Piano: Dr Svetlana Rudenko, Trinity College Dublin
Produced and sponsored by Haunted Planet Studios
Following a concert of Scriabin’s music with visuals projected to the unpainted wall, which took place in St Barnabas Church and affectionately remembered by Prof. Charles Spence from his student years, we bring Mixed Reality immersive interactive experience with a following program:
- A. Scriabin Sonata N5 Op. 53, visuals by Dr Maura McDonnell
- A. Scriabin, Five Preludes Op. 74 Mixed Reality (MR)
- S. Rachmaninoff, Preludes Op. 32 N1-5 and N10 MR
- S. Rudenko, “De Chirico: Metaphysical Art MR”
- S. Rudenko, Alice Dali MR: “The Pool of Tears”, “Who Stole the Tarts?” and “Alice’s Evidence” by Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
The figure of the Russian symbolist composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) has held a mysterious fascination to this day. At the turn of the 20th century, the Mystic Symbolist movement was in full bloom, and Scriabin was hailed as a visionary. His synesthesia inspired his vision of unity of arts, where music, visuals, pantomime, movement and essence to create a multisensory performance.
It was Scriabin’s life ambition to create a multisensory drama capable of transforming the consciousness of the human mind through an act of theurgy. By inserting a colour organ in his poem Prometheus, he wanted to make harmony more evident with coloured light. Scriabin developed a new approach to the principles of harmony by considering a broader concept of temperament, dual modality mode, and was precursor of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism and Messiaen’s modes of limited transpositions. His late piano miniatures, Opuses 71, 73, and 74, are considered to be sketches for the Preparatory Act of Mysterium, Scriabin’s final unfinished multisensory drama, for which he wrote a verbal narrative.
In this concert, we will realise Scriabin’s vision one more time in the space where it took place in the 1983. The piano and live visuals with the latest Mixed Reality technology will create a lavish multisensory experience. It is symbolic that the technology today allows us to fulfil Scriabin’s vision. MR visuals by Haunted Planet Studios, collaborative design by S. Rudenko, M. Haahr and X. Fu (programming)
Scriabin Sonata N5 https://vimeo.com/337354023
Alice Dali MR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5McCSCa26I
More about Music Consciousness and Mixed Reality: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-10518-9_31
“Exploring Dreaming with Mixed Reality” (DreaMR) engages with the human experience of dreaming through art, music and consciousness science. Using cutting-edge Mixed Reality (MR), we approach dreaming like surrealist paintings: experiences that reside halfway between the visible and the invisible. MR technology is uniquely suited for this purpose, because it positions the audience not within a virtual world (like VR technology does) but in a liminal space that blends the real with the un-real, the conscious with the unconscious, the physical world with the world of dreams.