24 Hours @ once at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's CRAIVE Lab & Architecture

We are thrilled to announce 24 Hours @ Once, a prototype six-hour video installation and live music performance delving into questions of human collectivity and temporality. This immersive prototype event will take place at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's CRAIVE Lab on Saturday, September 14, 2024, from 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM.

The installation will showcase live video feeds from 24 time zones, simultaneously projected onto 24 screens, as live musical performances based on the North Indian classical raga system take place, with each raga corresponding to a specific hour of the Earth’s daily cycle.

This event is the first fruit of a dynamic 24 Hours @ Once project, resulting from an and ongoing collaboration between Arts Letters & Numbers, RPI’s School of Architecture, visionary filmmaker Bill Morrison, and acclaimed composer/pianist Michael Harrison’s Raga Cycle Project, featuring vocalist Ina Filip, keyboardist Elliot Cole, electronic musician Benoit Rolland, and Indian tabla player Mir Naqibul Islam, as well as Xu Bing’s SCA-1 Art Satellite, with artistic direction by ALN founding director David Gersten, RPI Architecture faculty Carla Leitao and Ed Keller, and EMPAC research engineer Samuel Chabot.

In iterations still to come, 24 Hours @ Once and the Raga Cycle Project will eventually include 24 hours of new music with 24 ragas adapted to all 24 hours of the day and night,  and the integration of an extraordinary  25th perspective — a ‘25th Hour.’ The music explores hybrid relationships between Indian ragas (melodic archetypes) and talas (rhythmic cycles), and elements of Western music. Ragas and Indian classical techniques are adapted for the piano, which is tuned in a unique form of just intonation designed by Michael Harrison. Xu Bing’s SCA-1 Art Satellite will project images onto a screen in outer space, while capturing video footage of itself relational to Earth. Conceived of as a ‘25th Hour,’ this perspective will enrich our consideration of global interconnectivity.