Experience Vanishing Point – an immersive concert where orchestral music, experimental performance, and cutting-edge visuals converge to explore the tipping points shaping our world.
A tipping point is a critical threshold beyond which a system reorganises—often abruptly and irreversibly—triggering profound shifts in climate, technology, and society.
Set in The Light Room Studio at ILA, transformed into a digital waystation where music transcends physical space, Vanishing Point brings together an ensemble of 12 Adelaide Symphony Orchestra musicians alongside experimental cellist David Moran (live-streamed), this performance features new music by composer and media artist Luke Harrald, with visuals by computer scientist Nick Falkner.
Part of the Australian Research Council funded project “Rebooting the Muse: Harnessing digital technologies for sustainability in the Australian Performing Arts”, this project is a partnership between ILA (Adelaide’s Centre for Immersive Light and Art), The University of Adelaide, and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra that explores combining networked and immersive technologies to create new audience experiences and remote ways of working. This concert will feature Moran performing remotely from The University of Adelaide, via bi-directional audio and visual streaming with the live musicians and projections across the 140sqm of LED screens in The Light Room Studio at ILA.
The Artists behind Vanishing Point:
Luke Harrald (Composer)
Luke Harrald is an award-winning composer, media artist and educator. His work challenges ways that we interact with technology and explores how it influences our experience of place and culture. He creates a wide variety of work ranging from traditional concert performances to public art and immersive installations that offer unique experiences and use cutting edge technologies to tell historical and contemporary stories. Currently, Luke is Head of Creative Practice at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.
Researcher Profile | Website | Facebook
David Moran, (Cellist)
David Moran is an Australian cellist with broad musical interests specialising in the interpretation of exploratory music. Recent accolades include 5-star reviews in Limelight for Kate Neal’s, ‘While You Sleep’, at the Canberra International Music Festival, and for his performances in ‘1:1’ for the Adelaide Festival. The former earned him a 2023 nomination for an APRA AMCOS Art Music Award for ‘Best Performance: Notated Composition’. David has performed in the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (2022-23) and was the 2023 cellist for ULYSSES Ensemble for its summer tour in France and Italy. This year he will present and perform at the prestigious Darmstadt Summer Course on ‘arc’, a solo cello piece composed for him by Charlie Sdraulig in 2023. David is a casual cellist with the Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras and performs regularly with his Melbourne-based trio, Moirai. David is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, where he continues his inquiry into experimental cello technique.
Nick Falkner, (Visuals)
Nick Falkner is a computer scientist, educator and artist who uses computational and traditional techniques to create works that help us to understand complex and meaningful data about our world. He currently works in the Faculty of SET at the University of Adelaide.
His visuals for the work, Vanishing Point are a data driven artwork called The Fragility of the Whale.
The Fragility of the Whale is a visualisation project that links the vanishing species of whales with one of the most famous texts about whales, Melville’s Moby Dick. If we assume that writing about whales is impossible unless we have whales, what would happen if whales passed so far into memory that written works about them lost their meaning? To visualise this linkage, the nearly 10,000 sentences in this classic work are removed one at a time in a continuous moving image, from random positions in the text, until the entire work is gone, except for the bones of the chapters and the first sentence – ‘Call Me Ishmael’.
This removal mirrors the reductions in whale populations worldwide, but takes it to the worst possible outcome, that all whales are gone forever and all we are left with is a skeleton of what once was, and a hint of what we have lost.
ASO ensemble
Luke Dollman, conductor
Cameron Hill, Lachlan Bramble, violin
David Wicks, viola
Gemma Phillips, cello
Gustavo Quintino, bass
Julia Grenfell, flute
Peter Duggan, oboe
Mitchell Berick, clarinet
Mark Gaydon, bassoon
Adrian Uren, horn
Martin Phillipson, trumpet
Colin Prichard, trombone
Session Times: (50mins approx)
7pm & 9pm
Tickets
$40 +bf
ILA accepts companion cards. More info on accessibility at ILA here.
WARNING: Haze, strobe lighting and other intense lighting will be used during this show. It may not be safe for those with epilepsy and other conditions with sensitivity to light or haze.
