Sometimes we don't delve into enough artistic intrigue here in Pittsburgh, where an artist will stick to a core truth without deliberately seeking to please an audience.

Of course it helps to gather the funding for a single project, even if it is spread out over years of gestation. An existing company has to adhere to a constant bottom line. And it helps to have Carnegie Mellon University's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on that funding bandwagon, a place where science is sometimes regarded as art and art is sometimes regarded as science. Usually never the twain do meet.

However, STUDIO fellow Grisha Coleman is deliberately setting out to do just that in "echo::system -- THE DESERT." It follows the seafaring landscape of "THE ABYSS" and is the second in a series of five systems that combine art and science in experimental ways and will be presented throughout the United States.

With Coleman directing the overall concept, the team consisted of an evolutionary biologist and an information architect among sound, lighting and visual design experts. Numerous consultants provided feedback. Thus the technical expectations were high and, with that, lingered a concern that the humanity of it all would be overwhelmed.

With all of the elements in place at Saturday night's 7:30 performance at the New Hazlett Theater, the effect was Cunningham-esque. In other words, like modern dance master Merce Cunningham, the video, music, dance and other assorted details each existed on a separate artistic plane, and if they really connected at any point, it seemed purely by chance.

The overriding concept of the project is currently in vogue. Several Japanese companies have exhibited their wares here in Pittsburgh, displaying a cross-disciplinary melange similar to what Coleman had put together, but without the scientific overlay.

The connecting tissue proved to be the almost harsh desert environment, consisting of square sand-colored tiles that were molded into angular, singularly geometric dunes. The larger one lit up at the seams at one point, and the other, more vertical dune held a video screen.

Dramaturg Douglas Kearney's mythological trail of Drones, Mud Men, Drone-Bones, Skateboarders, The Mummy and The Suits periodically evaporated. Onome Ekeh's recorded text lacked clarity, and the costume changes -- costumes with zippers that denoted the Drone-Bones, the lack of zippers perhaps signaling a transition to Mud Men -- was sometimes confusing.

Nonetheless, this "desert" was alive in many ways. Coleman's choreography, at first organically neolithic with its slow, crouched positions and later the inverse skateboarding on treadmills, with the five members of the cast often reaching to the orb that represented the sun, produced a vocabulary all its own. Likewise with her score, a chromatically modulating, close-knit chordal rendering that eerily conveyed her civilization with sustained nonsense syllables.

The last element dealt with the audience itself. Coleman specifically wanted a choice -- those that would integrate with the performers in "THE DESERT" and those that would observe from the balcony above, much like the trio of technicians who sat at tables laden with equipment, resembling judges on a reality show.

The audience was not allowed to enter until the performers, this civilization, was in place. The end returned to a semblance of the beginning and the audience was signaled to leave, without applause (although there was a determined smattering by some members of the audience), and we left them as we found them.

But we were changed as we saw this desert in ourselves.