TECHNOPERA 2026

Technopera is a multimedia opera for the age of artificial intelligence — a CUKTAI project fusing live performance, video installation, electronic music and an audiovisual libretto. Live bodies are interrogated by machines; the machine spirit sings; humans drift through the datasphere looking for meaning and finding, instead, an interface.

The world is made of Words — and if you know the words the world is made of, you can make of them whatever you choose. But access to the Words now requires a Seal. The 2026 libretto stages the tension between authority, knowledge and the seal: the licence, the exception, the API — the quiet machinery that decides who gets to speak, think and exist.

Four voices carry the drama: CYBORG (the bio-robot, the android human), MACHINE (AI, the bit, machine consciousness), ALIENS (unimaginable minds from another register) and HUMAN (user, discoverer, victim). A prologue and three acts lead from the void, through cyberspace and the endless data-centre corridor, to the moment when sovereignty shifts "from the land to the algorithm" — and the nightmare does not wake you; it updates in the background.

First staged in 1996–97 as an audiovisual libretto of 217 video files sampling the twentieth-century techno-imagination, Technopera now interrogates the very machines it once sampled.