In The Ring

FEDORA
KEARNEY
Digital Prize 2027
Shortlist

In The Ring

Netherlands
Coops & Co

In The Ring © Thyrza Coenraad i

In the Ring is a 60-minute live role-playing opera in which the audience take on the role of God, Dwarf or Giant, using their phones to play and shape a world that rises around them as three opera singers sing it into being. Who holds the power in an age of AI and Big Tech?

Presentation

Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is one of the most ambitious and influential works in the history of opera. The cycle revolves around a magic ring that promises unlimited power but also carries a curse: Wagner shows that the pursuit of absolute power corrupts, a mechanism still recognisable in today's political and economic power structures. Across the twenty-six years in which he wrote the cycle his worldview shifted: in the first operas he believes in utopia, but by the fourth part that optimism has vanished. Utopia is doomed to fail, and the abuse of power is not incidental to humanity but intrinsic to it. In the Ring takes up that tension: how much conflict, difference and uncertainty are we willing to endure?

In the Ring translates this myth into the present. The audience is divided into three roles, each a position in today's society. The Gods are the state: formal power, yet dependent on the very technologies they try to regulate. The Dwarves are the tech developers: begun in optimism, swallowed by a relentless drive for growth. The Giants are the investors: capital that always wants its return. Later, players may leave their role to join The People, a collective of protest that undermines the others.

The company Rhinemaidens Ltd has tried to simulate an ideal society, but the system does not hold. The audience is asked to start again and build their own Walhalla. In act one they build it with earned Rhinegold (in our adaptation, the gold is the population's data). In act two manipulation begins; groups can steal gold from one another. In act three the role with the most power receives the Ring, and a choice: seize more, or share. In act four the people can rise up and destroy the Walhalla. The dome burns. The system restarts. Could we have reached a different outcome, or is destruction intrinsic to the system?