Piano Hero
#1–4
- Stefan Prins

is an hour-long cycle of four pieces (2011–17) for one pianist, playing a keyboard and grand piano, with live electronics and live video. It attempts to recontextualise the piano (and the piano recital) and place it firmly into today’s contemporary, highly technologised and mediated society, in which we all have avatars, are constantly being surveilled, and in which the borders between the real and the virtual have evaporated. 

Immersion is the state of consciousness where an immersant’s awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment; often artificial. is mental state is frequently accompanied with spatial excess, intense focus, a distorted sense of time, and effortless action. 

Wikipedia 

If something startles the player out of immersion and into reality, out of illusion and into insight, then we have a moment of arrest remarkably similar to the instant when an antibody latches onto a virus. Suddenly, a shift in the system (immunological or ideological) occurs, and nothing remains the same. 

Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art 

(London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 58 Stefan Prins 

The piece was coproduced by Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, Ultima Festival Oslo, Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, and Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) in Zürich.