Midway through the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager played by Don Cheadle who finds himself increasingly isolated as the world around him descends into genocidal strife, thinks he’s found an out. When a TV news cameraman played by Joaquin Phoenix returns to the hotel with footage of the horrors from the streets of Kigali City, Rusesabagina exclaims that once the world sees what is happening in Rwanda, they will respond and the carnage will end.

Mr. Phoenix, in one of this decade’s more apocryphal movie moments, stares ahead grimly at this sudden burst of optimism and says, “No, they’ll say, ‘Oh that’s terrible.’ Then they’ll return to eating their dinner.”

It’s the range of unpredictable responses that Americans have to news events that has provided the inspiration for “Still Life With Commentator,” an Oratorio created by the jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, the performance poet Michael Ladd, and the theater director Ibrahim Quraishi about the disorienting effects of wartime media.

After an especially productive rehearsal last week, all three men slowed down to discuss the production.

“It really began when the images of Abu Ghraib began to transmit all over the world,” Mr. Iyer said, adding that the three were motivated to produce a work about the atrocity, but were then puzzled by the task of presenting something that didn’t immediately trivialize their subject.

“Our collective nightmare was having it be like ‘Atrocity! A Broadway Show,'” Mr. Iyer explained.

But then their focus shifted. “We noticed everyone was watching and we began watching everyone else watching and weighing in,” he said. That became the meat for their concerns. In the show, live actors, video, and music merge to bombard us with the objects of sustenance that come as much from a virtual environment as they do from a physical one.”The blogosphere was exploding at the time and it seemed a new kind of narrative formed about bearing witness, proving that you were there.”

Messrs. Iyer and Ladd had worked together previously on a 2003 commission by the Asia Society called “In What Language,” which focused on identity and travel in a post-September 11 world. The two began to work again and sought out Mr. Ibrahim, a Pakistani-born conceptual artist for stage designs.

“I wanted to deal with the issue of surveillance in a nonlinear way,” Mr. Quraishi, a founder of the Compagnie Faim de Siècle, said. His work favors abstract approaches. “I’m interested in finding colder spaces, ways we can tell stories without the emotive hook of psychological drama.”

Though the style may be challenging to the audience, he explained that it “enables us to present moral lessons in a nondidactic way.”

These elements may make the piece seem cold, but it’s balanced by the abundant humor in the work. One segment is called “Riding on the Intro Graphics to Cable News.” In another, called “Mt. Rather,” quotations from Jon Stewart and Dr. Phil gleefully crop up.

Mr. Iyer is cautiously enthusiastic about the elements of parody within the piece. “This is more of a satirical piece, but you can’t really satirize TV news because it will always outdo you,” he said. “You can’t exaggerate something that is already outsized and manipulative.”

The music is performed by a small ensemble featuring Mr. Iyer on keyboards, the guitarist Liberty Ellman, the cellist Okkyung Lee, and the vocalists Pamela Z and Guillermo Brown, but the sounds have an electronic feel. During a concert performance of excerpts from the oratorio 10 days ago at Galapagos, the performance space in Williamsburg, many of Mr. Iyer’s trademark touches shone through.

Mr. Iyer grew up in upstate New York, the son of Indian immigrants, and holds degrees in math and physics from Yale. His music often merges Asian and American musical elements in an abstract form, and he’s fond of creating small rhythmic figures that mimic tabla drumming and building them into larger ensemble statements. In many ways, he’s doing with South Asian music what jazz great Randy Weston does with West African rhythms. Mr. Iyer, who has become increasingly known on the jazz scene as one of the finest young pianists to emerge in the last 15 years, leads several jazz groups, notably Raw Materials, which he coleads with the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa.

His new work allows him to bring together two different musical styles.

“What this is for me is a way of merging electronic and acoustic approaches,” he said of the new project. “Structurally, it’s very much the same, but the means by which some of it is rendered — composing on electronic instruments — makes it different.”

Although the music has the cool sheen of electronic pop, it is highlighted by gentle cascades of insinuating rhythms both from preprogrammed electronic drumbeats and keyboards.

“We’re at the point where the use of electronics doesn’t have to be the point of a piece of music,” Mr. Iyer said. “It’s just part of the general arsenal that we have at our disposal. It’s like using a bassoon.”

As was the case with “In What Language,” “Still Life With Commentator” will be released on Pi Recordings. Mr. Ladd suspects this isn’t the last collaboration between these artists.

“It was about understanding our roots and figuring out our mobility,” he said.

“We’re hyphenated individuals already, and we were eager to figure out new ways to plug in those hyphens into many different sockets.”

Through December 10 (30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).