Virtual Electronic Poem at MoCA of Los Angeles

The Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) project (2005) realized a virtual reality (VR) reconstruction of the global experience of the Poème électronique by Le Corbusier, Varèse and Xenakis at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The reconstruction went through a philologically accurate investigation of the original installation, starting from the available historical sources (the schedule of the visual show from the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, a fragment of the control instructions for audio routing on the 350 loudspeakers published in the Philips Technical Review, the Philips Company photographic archives, albums and catalogues of the ’58 Expo). Then, all the available materials were retrieved and digitalized, and in some cases produced from scratch: the electronic music by Varèse and the interlude by Xenakis on the original audio tapes at The Hague Conservatorium, the film by Le Corbusier and Agostini, the light ambiances designed by Le Corbusier and Kalff, the visual effects – tritrous, sun, moon, stars, lightning, clouds. Finally, a virtual reality implementation integrated the reconstructed material in an audiovisual experience, staged inside the computer graphics reconstruction of the Philips Pavilion. The VR installation gives visitors a renowned fruition of the Poème électronique. The installation at MOCA of LA consists of a screen, a joystick, and headphones. One/two persons can experience the Virtual Electronic Poem. The screen is a first-person view from the central position within the virtual pavilion. The show presents Concret PH first (about 2 minutes) and Poème électronique then (8 minutes), as in the original setting. The user starts the show by pressing a button on the joystick; she/he can stop the show at any time through another button. During the show, the user can direct her/his view with the joystick, and the stereophonic audio in the headphones is spatialized accordingly.