Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics

The Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) presents the first-ever "laptopera". The Furies: A Laptopera is a retelling of the Greek tragedy Electra. Blending a number of versions of the Electra story including works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Jean Paul Sartre, this retelling explores central questions regarding how communities escape from cycles of violence, the role of guilt and shame in community identity, personal responsibility, how justice interfaces with cycles of violence, and redemption. The artistic medium of the laptop orchestra both serves to recast the traditional instrumental role in a new kind of operatic medium (the “laptopera”) that reimagines the potential of instrument building to support dramatic elements and character relationships—while simultaneously positing critical questions about technology in our lives presently, both in its promise to help us flourish and in its perils to perpetuate and amplify the existing cycles of violence in our world today.