A multimedia "Titanic."

The mania never ceases.

After nearly a century in extremely deep water, a half-dozen movie portrayals, touring exhibits of broken artifacts, and serenades by Celine Dion, RMS Titanic fascinates the public almost as if it sank yesterday, the latest manifestation being a multimedia concert mounted by the cutting-edge Peregrine Arts.

Tonight and tomorrow night, The Sinking of the Titanic, a once avant-garde work by British composer Gavin Bryars, will be performed in conjunction with a newly created video element by Bill Morrison utilizing poetically decaying archival footage. Yet another layer is a memorial of sorts for Harry Elkins Widener, the wealthy Philadelphia book collector who died on nautical history's most famous night to remember, having been in Europe to acquire a rare edition of Francis Bacon's essays.

The performances will be in a venue where the fringy Peregrine audience never thought to tread: the fortresslike Union League on Broad Street, whose rooms look like something out of, well, the Titanic. In what might be called an immersion experience, tomorrow's performance and gala will reconstruct the menu served the night the ship sank.

The artists involved are as surprised as any to witness their involvement in a project that has turned out to involve the oddest of bedfellows. Peregrine Arts founder Thaddeus Squire has long sought out Philadelphia venues that are taken for granted, if not overlooked, and discovered that the Union League, with its air of exclusivity, was interested in hosting a larger, less-conventional public.

James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, with its spectacular photography but painfully naive dialogue, was enough to turn off key parties in New York's Ridge Theater, among them video artist Morrison. However, Peregrine is looking into an ongoing relationship with Bryars, and The Sinking of the Titanic, one of his best-known pieces, looked like a good place to start. Before long, Morrison hopelessly capitulated.

"The Titanic rightly deserves its place in popular culture," he said from his downtown Manhattan studio. "The fact that it's a commonplace tale had deadened me to it. But when I started to get inside of what happened, reading accounts by survivors, and ultimately going back to the Cameron movie, it's an incredible story of unimaginable hubris on the scale of Greek mythology. And over the last few months, I've become quite obsessed with it."

Veteran composer Bryars, who first devised the piece in 1969, has seen far worse in the world's various Titanic societies. "They're the scary people," he says. "You'll start a conversation about something and they'll turn it to the Titanic."

Luckily, The Sinking of the Titanic is one Bryars score open-ended enough to accommodate many kinds of presentation. Critic Paul Cook described it as "a ghostly tapestry of eerie echoes, distant sounds almost like whale songs, and interjected rifts representing the band that was playing even as the boat sank."

Similar descriptions could be applied to Morrison's art, which is best known in the mesmerizing 2002 cult film Decasia: The State of Decay. The narrative-free film presents a succession of black-and-white movie images shot on archaic decaying nitrate, creating disarmingly poetic refractions of the people and places shot on film.

Expect a similar aesthetic - "the more decayed [the footage] the better; it fits with the theme" - on 72-foot screens being set up at the Union League. "I found icebergs shot in the wake of the Titanic disaster. As a result of the Titanic disaster, there were ice patrols to keep shipping lanes safer," Morrison said. "I found a collection of other steamers that resembled the Titanic. Lots of footage of that stuff is spliced together. Part of the whole Philadelphia angle is the Widener book collection - and we have a video montage [drawn from the Widener archives at Rosenbach Museum and Library] dealing with that."

The weekend production and gala is, like most Peregrine endeavors, a testing ground for other venues, even tours. As gargantuan as the Titanic was, Morrison's visual portrayal fits in three boxes that don't even require so much as a truck rental.

Much more troublesome is the proper mode of Union League attire: Even "business casual dress code" is, for Morrison, "dressed up beyond my wildest dreams."