Marking the conclusion of Tim Hopkins' five-year AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts, CROMT is hosting a two-day programme of exhibitions, discussion and performance-in-progress reflecting on uses of digital media in relation to opera.
Creativity Zone, June 22/23 2012
“Astonished and Terrified”: opera and the transformation of the world by technology
(“Astonished and somewhat terrified” - Sir Arthur Sullivan’s recorded response to a demonstration of the new Edison phonograph in 1888).
Digital technology is now widely incorporated into the creative practice of many artists working in contemporary performance. In the case of opera this has multiple manifestations and implications:
- changes in modes of presentation within the traditional technological environment of the stage, such as unprecedented amounts of moving image and discreet / overt sound design
- changes in who makes the work and how, where the processes of assembly have moved away from the artefact of the commissioned composers' score / libretto, towards mobilisation by other elements traditionally at work in opera's 400 year history (such as concept, dramaturgy, scenography)
- uses of digital media to export opera's constituents beyond collective experiences in theatres, such as uses of pervasive, locative media and live streaming to relocate / reconfigure relationships between music, narrative, audience, etc.
- new understandings of concepts such as “live" and “mediated”, etc.
- works that may use no contemporary technology devices, but thematise their presence
These developments have informed Tim Hopkins' AHRC Fellowship project, entitled ‘Some uses of new technology in lyric theatre, in relation to intermedial mise en scene in theatrical staging, and the remediation of operatic media’. Some of the outcomes of the research will be exhibited at this event.
Participating artists and thinkers joining Tim to discuss these questions will include:
- Tansy Davies (composer)
Rolf Wallin (composer)
Claudia Molitor (composer)
Craig Vear (composer)
Christopher Morris (writer)
Nick Till (theatre artist and theorist)