Archive for March 19th, 2007

MTV2 and the American Museum of Natural History join hands for SonicVision. A step beyond your average laser-light show, it fuses iPod-worthy music with mind-bending graphics. Minus a few oddities, it should be more popular than it is.

Mainly rock-tinged electronic music from the early “aughts” (as we’re taught from Gideon to call the 00s), SonicVision features a great mix by Moby. Radiohead, U2, David Bowie, Coldplay, Queens of the Stone Age, Prodigy, The Flaming Lips, Fischerspooner (who provide the music to The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet”), Spiritualized, Audioslave, Stereolab, Boards of Canada, David Byrne and Brian Eno, Goldfrapp, Zwan (The reunited Smashing Pumpkins’ new album is due out July 7, but does anyone know who the official members are yet?), and White Zombie are the soundtrack.

The psychedilic graphics will have your eyes (and heart!) racing through the universe as if you’re on an amusement-park thrill ride. Grasping for the armrest even though you’re not moving and flinching as if the graphics seemingly falling from the dome could actually hurt you, you walk out of the show laughing at yourself. In the context of a science museum, SonicVision perhaps is a subconsious reminder of how complex our bodies are. Our intellect and our eyes and ears can at times tell us two different things.

While most of the show feels like you’re trapped inside a video game or traveling through space, there are three dreamscapes that don’t work well: two verge on demonic and the other seems hoaky in its feel-good, uplifting message. The computer-generated art works much better when it stays within the realm of the abstract.

The movie “Night at the Museum” presupposed that after the American Museum of Natural History closes for the evening, all the animals come to life. Ravenous dinasour skeletons may not be the cause, but something’s to be said for the fact that the museum closes at 5:45 PM every day. The early closing time means the museum is losing out on a whole slew of money-earning nine-to-fivers. Behold SonicVision. Held on Friday and Saturday evenings at 7:30 and 8:30, it is geared toward teens and twenty-somethings, who are more into music than science. Cha-ching! The museum has found a way to target a fresh audience.

Maybe it was just the snowy night Uncool Kids went, but the museum apparently needs to do a bit more marketing. Seven-year-olds came tearing down the hall after the first showing, but come time for the second showing the planetarium was half-empty. The 8:30 show produced an odd mixture of older kids with their cool parents alongside early twenties hipsters and daters. The two-for-one coupon, great music, and breathtaking graphic art make SonicVision a great alternative to going to the movies. Check out the trailer here.