music by Steven Whiteley
"Icarus and Daedalus" is a contemporary opera based on the famous Greek myth of the same name. This sung narrative, following the classical structure of opera, interprets the story as an allegory of the generational tensions present in our time. A technophile father, convinced that every problem has an engineering solution, fails to realize that with each revolution of this mindset, the stakes escalate. His son Icarus, in love with nature and freedom, ultimately pays the ultimate price. The story lends itself admirably to opera's historical themes, such as the search for the divine in humanity, as well as the Deus ex machina.
The exercise of exploring a possible future of opera led me to conceive it in Virtual Reality (VR). The spectator, seated in their chair, is fully immersed in the scenography, echoing the grandiose codes of major city operas. The three acts each reflect a different perspective: imprisonment in the first act, elevation in the second, and downfall in the last.
The music was composed by Steven Whiteley, a composer of experimental ambient music. The text was sung by Artificial Intelligence and harmonized as a whole.
The figurative aesthetic is heavily inspired by surrealism, with a desire to confront the spectator with a fantastic but human-scale living arts scene. The film is entirely created in 3D, using a combination of numerous tools, such as virtual reality sculpture, video game animations, and bird flock simulations.