Opera on Brainwaves

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Digital Prize 2021
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Opera on Brainwaves

Belgium
Muzi a Zeny

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Opera on Brainwaves © Kyky Kong Kong i

Opera on Brainwaves is a unique augmented opera experience that will take you on a journey of exploration into the self and the other, into emotions and technology through Smart Fashion.

Presentation

Opera on Brainwaves is a boundary-pushing artistic collaboration between 2 pioneers: opera singer Elise Caluwaerts and fashion tech designer Jasna Rok. For this unique project, they join forces to combine the beauty of a highly regarded and established artform with cutting edge technology. Through a process of research and prototyping, they will create a unique piece that will link the emotions of the singer and audience through neuroscience and heartbeats.

Opera is a highly emotional experience for an audience as well as for performers. It is an art form that impresses with extreme technical skill and breathtakingly intense aesthetics, but mostly it’s a multi-sensory means of making sense of the painful, glorious, complicated truths about the human condition and therefore universal. This makes opera the perfect companion on a journey of exploration into the self and the other, into emotions and technology.

We have the ambition to visualize this through an interactive dress the opera singer will wear during the performance. It will show real-time emotions and states of mind with scientific data generated by an EEG sensor. The audience will be able to see these emotions reflected in the dress and will thus have an augmented empathetic experience, by feeling empathy and identifying with the “real” emotions of the performer, e.g. stress, concentration, joy, etc and at the same time, they will feel the emotions reflected in and generated by the music. This project will amaze and wow audiences all over the world by pioneering the combination of the intense art of opera, classical music, emotion tech, art, technology, brainwaves, and science.

This interactive dress offers a singular moment in time to reconnect with ourselves and travel to an alternate, magical reality where we can connect with the innermost feelings of ourselves and the performer. It’s an intimate experience.

With the support of the City of Antwerp, the University of Antwerp, Flanders, Artes law, Starsky, Imec, Flyinggroup, Glassroots and the Port of Antwerp.

Artistic Team

Elise Caluwaerts, Belgian
Elise is a renowned soloist both in Belgium and abroad. She began her singing career as a baroque singer, and later expanded her repertoire to the romantic and contemporary genre. Her love for challenging repertoire – ranging from opera to multidisciplinary projects – led to various creations and remarkable collaborations with internationally renowned composers and ensembles.
Elise is highly in demand as a soloist with leading ensembles and orchestras. She juggles a creative career, with multidisciplinary projects at the same time as being a classical soloist and often curator for classical music events.
In 2022 she will be an artist in residence with California Symphony for which she has programmed a full season. In 2021 she will produce a new multimedia project around female composer Alma Mahler in collaboration with the Mahler Foundation as well as new two film projects on classical arias together with Dutch filmmaker Lucas van Woerkum who founded Symphonic Cinema.

Jasna Rokegem, Belgian
Jasna Rokegem is an award-winning pioneer, she founded Jasna Rok, the first FashionTech design lab in Belgium, which was created to reconcile advanced technologies with interactive fashion and does so by collaborating with technology partners globally. Her visionary thinking helps decision-makers in different industries imagine how to come up with more sustainable solutions. She has been working with Nokia Bell Labs, Volkswagen, SAP, Nasa, GE,... and has been showcasing her work on many events within different fields as fashion weeks all over the world, technology conferences as SXSW, Tedx, and been featured in several documentaries as ARTE, VPRO, Canal Z,...
Jasna is fascinated by space and the idea of having one unique garment which becomes a living organism on its own, an extension of our bodies which creates a new way of human communication that reshapes our responses to our innermost feelings, a brand new dimension of interaction.
She dreams of having one garment that rules them all!