Opera Toolkit
An Investigation Into New Forms Of Opera
Opera Toolkit was a research project and workshop series bringing in practitioners from audiovisual disciplines, as well as performers, dancers and musicians to prototype new forms of interactive opera. Similar to Wagner’s concept of Gesampkunstwerk, the premise of Opera Toolkit was asking what could a “total work of art” could look like with today’s technology, and how musical drama could be reimagined.
The project built upon Gene Kogan’s Kinect Projector Toolkit, a library for Processing and OpenFrameworks that calibrates a projector to a Kinect depth camera, which aligns a projection to the physical space it’s lighting, essentially creating an accessible, low-cost, projection mapping tool for the stage.
The aim was to both provide a platform for people with varied skills in diverse artistic communities to collaborate, as well as prototype a toolkit that could be used to create new forms of opera (which we defined widely as any sort of musical dramatic performance), including software tools as well as performance prompts.
