News Story

Modern life is filled with an incredibly quickly changing atmosphere of audiovisuals around us. So much of our artistic work is still about single perspective, two speaker system orientation to the world of the arts, whereas in Big Tent, you have sound coming from all around you, from multiple sources.

People are shown inside the Big Tent, watching the films on the walls. Cox is also echoing because he’s inside the Big Tent as well.

And the visuals are also projected from all around you, so it’s very immersive, much like our life is in terms of our experience with sound and audio outside of the arts. So Big Tent is designed to go just about anywhere and have a wide variety of content. It’s 40 feet diameter, it has eight channels of audio and surround video of the 1,152 square feet video screen surface.

A poster advertising the Big Tent is shown.

Starting conversations in fall of 2013, Ben Smith and I as new faculty of IUPUI decided to take on the challenge of making 360-degree audiovisual performance that was portable and could be done without a great deal of expense. Because usually, TVs and these types of environments of 360 surround sound and video are fixed locations and not very accessible for the public, so we wanted to create something that reflected more of what modern life actually gives us as the context by which we learn about the world and apply that to the arts.

Produced by Deonna Weatherly