Gallery concerts deliberately fused art, technology, and audience to provoke altered states

Evidence

The Four Pianos performances epitomized the Park Place utopian vision—an environment conducive to shared ideas and pooled resources, a place for new technology and collaborations with nonartists. Carman Moore’s laudatory review, illustrated by Fred McDarrah’s photograph of the concert refracted through a bank of Ross’s prisms, described “a well-attended and glittering affair” that literally blew minds: “So strong was the effect of Four Pianos that one of the listeners, who were all sprawled on the floor, fell into a howling kind of fit from which he emerged, shaken but otherwise (I think) undamaged.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1045

Categorization

• XREF: Park Place’s pooled-resources, tech-with-nonartists utopianism is an early instance of the collective-scene conditions the reader is mapping as causes of invention density. — connects to: The spectacle gave way to a tactile system that solicits audience participation