Engineering the future of entertainment (2024)

Purdue College of Engineering

Published in

Purdue Engineering Review

5 min read

Dec 8, 2020

Engineering the future of entertainment (3)

The role of engineering in live entertainment has a rich history, going back to the ancient Greek apò mēkhanês theós — “god from the machine” — where actors playing deities were lowered from a crane onto the stage. We’ve come a long way from the mechanical contrivance of the tragedian Aeschylus to Lady Gaga’s halftime show at the 2017 Super Bowl, where synchronized drones with color-emitting LEDs created giant animations in the sky above the arena.

Live entertainment is riding a wave of digitization and engineered content. Digital controls send sound signals to specific speakers so the right frequency gets to the right place in the auditorium at the right time. Moving light technologies and color-adaptive LEDs have changed the way we think about lighting for live performances. There are advanced motor technologies for moving scenery; digital control technologies and networking; and things like augmented and virtual reality that push the boundaries of what we mean by live entertainment.

As engineering has become pervasive in entertainment, we’ve seen growing interest from students who have a passion for entertainment, as well as a love of the engineering sciences and technology. This trend intersects with increasing industry needs and expectations for more complex technology and engineering-based spectacles to wow audiences.

Many of us believe this convergence has reached a critical mass, such that you really need to be an engineer to do much of what we want to do today in high-end live performance. Fulfilling this requirement demands both technical engineering expertise and the engineering mindset.

The engineering skills needed are multidisciplinary, encompassing the mechanical, electrical, and civil fields, among others. For example, it’s not uncommon in large performances to throw a 6,000-pound (or even heavier) piece of scenery around the stage using motors and controls at a rate of four to six feet per second. Such activity could be fatal to an operator or performers, and to accomplish it safely, repeatedly and accurately requires significant engineering knowledge.

Live entertainment productions today also require the mentality that we teach across all engineering disciplines — spanning things like a code of ethics, failure analysis, mitigating and minimizing risk, and creating redundant systems for safety. That’s all a part of the engineering mindset, our core values. That’s where the engineering value goes beyond creating the extravaganza, giving the system a backbone of ethical design and risk management control.

Engineering the future of entertainment (4)

At Purdue, we have a four-year Multidisciplinary Engineering program with a concentration in Theatre Engineering. In addition to a general engineering education, students have an opportunity to learn about theatre by progressing from hands-on learning as deck carpenters to figuring out how to build scenery and get it on stage, to creating cost estimates and build schedules. This learning culminates in the senior year in a curated, engineering-focused challenge involving mechanical and structural design and control systems in a real production.

And to top it all off, we’ve just established the Fusion Studio for Entertainment and Engineering to push the envelope of innovation around engineered designs and technology for the entertainment industry. It’s a hub for people who are thinking about the future of entertainment in the broadest way possible. We’re creating a community from industry leaders, scholars, and students to talk about pressing issues and what’s next, exploring and stretching the boundaries of what is happening in the field.

We think the future of engineering in live entertainment is boundless, with synergies and conflations of fields and disciplines that folks are just starting to explore. When we speak with students about their career trajectories, we don’t talk about job titles and positions as much as we discuss the knowledge base and skills they’ll need to apply to the kinds of challenges and problems that people will need and want to solve.

As an example, big data and its applications in performance have only begun to be examined. Massively large datasets — including data created in real time by the audience, participants and musicians — will be used in new ways that we, frankly, can’t even fully envision. This emerging trove of information could fuel the trend toward a more specific, personalized experience that can go in a thousand directions — especially with the advent of wearables and all the data that comes with it.

Imagine that aspects of your personal identity are encoded in some way and projected into the performance. That blazes paths into areas that are data-rich, and requires analytical minds to create infrastructures that don’t exist yet, along with tools to manage and exploit the data in inventive ways. What if, for instance, drones could develop imagery associated with the audience?

This data-driven participation may not even depend on physical proximity to the show — a factor of increased relevance during social distancing and stay-at-home ethos of the coronavirus pandemic, which may continue in the follow-on “new normal.” What does it mean to perform remotely and globally, synchronously and asynchronously? What will that look like?

Neil Armstrong was involved in theatre while he was here at Purdue, co-directing a musical production. Who knows, someday there might be a — heavily engineered — performance on the moon.

Let’s do it. We say Purdue should be first.