M.A.R.S. is a global music and arts community, aims to connect musicians, artists, theater professionals, designers, scientists, researchers and technology engineers.
M.A.R.S. has incubated the international festival for music and arts: Festival M.A.R.S. (Music & Arts ReSound); the multidisciplinary collective Studio M.A.R.S. (Music Art Research Science); and planning for the Metaverse Museum M.A.R.S. in the near future.
FESTIVAL M.A.R.S.(Music & Arts ReSound)
www.festivalmars.com
In 2017, Wen founded international multidisciplinary Festival M.A.R.S.(Music&Arts ReSound) in Los Angeles.Over a hundred musicians and artists have been invited, including the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, the Ensemble Pamplemousse, the artist collective Dosshaus, ThisPlay Creative Studio, as well as prominent figures such as Tiffany Trenda, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Jay Mark Johnson, Natacha Diels, Alexander Schubert, Katharina Rosenberger, and Ashley Fure.
Festival M.A.R.S. (Music & Arts ReSound) was created with the goal of merging contemporary music, arts and science into new forms, and to create, explore, and produce performances by coalescing various disciplines to create a pathway for a better understanding of our current position and future possibilities. With the target of creating platforms for internationally established musicians and artists of all kinds to promote their work and open new perspectives on seeing music through cross-artistic pairings.
Music, art, and science should come together to accomplish what one field alone cannot: to convey ideas and inspire changes in mindset, attitudes and behaviors that will lead to a better, more open human understanding on different levels and areas. As science seeks to better our understanding of the world, music and art allow us to express how our rapidly evolving reality acts us as humans, this is the mission of M.A.R.S.: To explore this new vision by combining science and technology with the expression of music and art.
These carefully curated and hand-picked events expand musical imagination by blurring the borders between music and other applied arts. Artists involved will choose a concept and theme that will govern their collaborative process, and foster a wider array of interests for audiences than those of an usual contemporary music festival.
Festival M.A.R.S. has been featured in: LA Times, LA Weekly, We Like LA, LA Daily News, Whittier Daily News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star, Vents Magazine, Downtown LA, InSideSoCal, Artillery, Happening in DTLA, LA Downtown News, DoLA, Discover Los Angeles, 89.3 KPCC, 93.1 JACK FM, Art and Cake LA, Cartwheel Magazine, CBS Los Angeles, New Classic LA, LA Independent Creative, Classical Concerts in LA, KUSC Arts Alive, Downtown Weekly, KCRW, IAA USA.
“In the future, concert festivals might look something like M.A.R.S.” - LA Daily News
“An extensive and immersive experience.” - Art and Cake LA
STUDIO M.A.R.S.(Music Art Research Science)
In 2021, Wen founded the Music+Art+Science+Technology collective Studio M.A.R.S. (Music Art Research Science), with the goal of exploring innovative multimedia storytelling, immersive music theatre designs, and hybrid forms of music theatre performance with deep integration of science and technology.
The first music theatre project of Studio M.A.R.S. was a live-interactive XR opera "Speculum Maius", which combines live multiplayer AR & VR apps for audience participation in the live opera. Speculum Maius premiered from December 9th to 11th, 2022 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in collaboration with Theater Bonn.
Studio M.A.R.S. unites a group of internationally established professionals from different fields, such as music composition, opera and theater dramaturgy, stage design, cinematography, interactive installation design, immersive projection mapping, live XR, AI and machine learning, game design, and modern science.
Studio M.A.R.S. specializes in innovative multimedia storytelling and immersive music theater production, pioneering new forms of performances featuring deep integration of science and technology, to create new experiences across disciplines.
With strong expertise in contemporary music, visual art, theater, new media and science, Studio M.A.R.S. is focusing on exploring cutting-edge multimedia theater forms, which incorporate AI-generated audio-visual installations, interactive XR and projections, and music performances, to create a larger form of immersive non-linear walk-through music theater that pushes the boundaries of the form by connecting multi-sensory technology and human perceptions.