Mimetic Possibilities: Collaboration through Movement in Multimedia Opera

Abstract In the opera The Ghost, artists with backgrounds in music composition, Greek tragedy, creative coding, and opera performance collaborated to create an artwork that engages with philosophy and technology. A light sculpture with a novel Internet of Things (IoT) architecture was adapted for the opera’s stage, where both the sculpture and its controlling interface were programmed to visually represent musical processes within the composer’s approach. During filming, the light sculpture contributed to the dramatic context through movement and gestural interaction between the sculpture and the soprano. Drawing upon human-computer interaction (HCI) research and its inquiry into movement for engaging with new technology expressively, movement and gesture transpiring from mimetic techniques in the opera were central in this interdisciplinary collaboration.