Digital performance showcases arts and technology partnership

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

Musicians appear to be performing on the same stage, when in fact they are performing from different campus locations in real time. The April 20 digital performance was hosted at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts during a reception formally announcing the Emerging Digital Research and Arts Media Institute (edream), which coincided with the annual conference of the Humanities Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Performing: from left, UI graduate student Ben Smith playing violin on Stage 5 at Krannert Center; John Toenjes, music director for dance at Illinois, on drums, and Mary Pietrowicz, NCSA research programmer, on flute, performing at NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory.

The piece, “eDream and be merry,” was created by the trio of musicians and music professor Guy Garnett and was made possible by a very high speed networking application between the Krannert Center and NCSA.

Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services upgraded Krannert Center’s building network connection from 1 gigabit per second to 10 gigabits per second to take advantage of the network throughput of the new Illinois Research Network.

The performance required extraordinary amounts of bandwidth to ensure that the uncompressed, high-definition video information from the dual locations could be transmitted and synchronized in real time. According to Charley Kline, CITES IT architect, “The successful April 20 performance demonstrated that our network can be used to support very demanding applications without special equipment or changes to its production configuration.”

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