If there’s such a thing as a Big Bang moment for modern computing, it happened on December 9, 1968. On that day, in an underground convention center in the heart of San Francisco, Doug Engelbart gave The Mother Of All Demos, introducing the world to an astonishing slew of technologies including word processing, video conferencing, windows, links, and the humble mouse. Over the course of the 90-minute demonstration, Engelbart laid the foundation for computing for decades to come.
Now, that vital moment is being reborn in suitably dramatic form: avant garde opera.
This week will see the world premiere of The Demo, a multimedia-heavy musical performance centering on Engelbart’s famous presentation, composed by Mikel Rouse and Ben Neill. The debut performances will happen April 1 and 2 at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall, only a short walk away from the buildings where Engelbart and his colleagues developed their pioneering technologies as members of the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.
In the show, Rouse plays Engelbart himself. The performance is anchored by the video of Engelbart’s original demonstration, which Rouse samples and splices with other footage using a similar computer setup to the one Engelbart introduced in ’68. Ben Neill, playing fellow computer trailblazer Bill English, performs the Mutantrumpet, a super-instrument of Neill’s own design that he also uses to control lights and other elements in the show. The music is a dense, continously-shifting tapestry of electronic beats. The libretto is drawn directly from the original video, echoing the scraps of code that occasionally appear on screen. The idea, as one contributor to the production evocatively put it, is to “dream Engelbart forwards and backwards.”
Rouse and Neill have been working on the show since 2012, when Neill first discovered Engelbart’s video while researching another project. At the time, though an avid technology user, Rouse never heard Engelbart’s name. “I knew it didn’t really start with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but at the same time, I didn’t know exactly where it came from,” he says. “I was like everybody else.”
Immediately, though, Rouse felt a connection to Engelbart’s visionary performance. The composer, whom the New York Times deemed among the best of his generation, is known for weaving visuals into his work in ambitious ways. His opera Dennis Cleveland was produced like a live TV program, with Rouse playing a talk show host. Four cameras captured him from various angles and broadcast his performance to a screen on stage (the audience played, well, the audience).
In Engelbart’s demo, Rouse saw as a sort of prototype of the form. “Even though he didn’t consider it a performance, it may have been one of the first times video had been used in a presentation of this kind.”
In addition to honoring Engelbart’s contribution, Rouse hopes the show will prod people to consider their relationship with technology today. Engelbart, who died in 2013, was in many ways ignored by the industry that emerged in the decades following his famous demo, and like other pioneers, he often voiced his frustration with the course it took.
“Our goal, by paying homage to the ’68 demo and showing these new technologies, is to get people to reflect,” Rouse says. “It would be really interesting if people walked out of the show and thought about how they use technology, and if they’re really reaping the benefits of what this amazing moment in time had to offer.”
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