Though honoria in ciberspazio, a self-proclaimed "cyberopera," has been in progress for several years and was even a semifinalist in this year's prestigious Global Information Infrastructure awards, it is still a work in progress.
On 21 March, an aria from the work will be staged at the University of Texas in Austin. Those interested in seeing a preview of how the traditional operatic form might change when it intersects with digital-age electronic collaboration might get a glimpse the future.
Conceived nearly four years ago by a small cadre of netizens involved in the Cybermind and University of Texas' Advanced Communications Technology Laboratory (ACTLab) cyber-communities, the opera grew out of real-world themes emerging online. More than 60 contributors have worked collaboratively (and, so far, without a budget) in developing the project.
"I was hanging out in virtual communities, and I really loved the virtual fiction that was being written there," said Madelyn Starbuck, aka honoria. (All of the opera's characters are based on "real" cyber-personalities.) "It was power plays and deceit and beauty and eloquence; and I went to an opera and realized it was the same thing."
Over the course of three years, contributors from around the world worked on the plot and libretto, a final version of which was posted online early this year. "I was besieged by people's stories of love affairs and experiments with identity and other stuff they've experienced on the Internet," said Starbuck.
The opera tells the story of five people seeking love and meaning in cyberspace. The characters' desires, explicated in email messages, spawn "clones" - virtual personalities that are nothing but reflections of the characters' own personae. The characters struggle to make their clones real, but ultimately find they are nothing but text on a screen.
But in a final scene, honoria finds love in a cyborg - thus reconciling the split between abstraction and reality.
Hardly the kind of subject matter that many opera-goers would expect to see onstage. Yet opera, as the seminal multimedia art form, has always dealt thematically with technology.
In Jacques Offenbach's well-known 19th century opera, Tales of Hoffman the main character falls in love with a life-sized mechanical doll, which must periodically be wound up in order to continue singing. Even Mozart weighed in with a few then-modern techno-references, including a song in "Cosi Fan Tutti" extolling the virtues of magnetism as a healing art.
Today, technology has become a central theme of opera. Philip Glass' famed trio of operas, Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, and Satyagraha, each deal with central characters who have had a profound influence on technology and science.
"Opera is a collage of different influences: the orchestra, singers, big costumes, big dramatic plot, all these different art forms in one place. So it's a natural fit for a multimedia audience," said Richard MacKinnon, the project's director of operations.
The first major experiment in collaborative Internet opera was MIT's Brain Opera, a massive, cerebral and abstract collage work that blended music contributed by audience members and Web-site visitors with compositions by Tod Machover and theoretical texts by Marvin Minsky. The work debuted at the first Lincoln Center Festival in New York City during the summer of 1996.
In comparison to the Brain Opera, honoria in ciberspazio is far more traditional in nature. Though the libretto for the opera was written collaboratively, Starbuck admitted that, "it deals with the oldest themes in the book: love and the search for meaning."
The producers decided to stick with a single composer for putting the words to music. They selected George Oldziey, whose main claim to fame is the music for the videogames Wing Commander III and IV. An instructor of music at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Oldziey has no experience writing opera.
But he's far from the only newbie in the group.
"Richard (MacKinnon) was an extra in an opera once; I have front-row season tickets for the Austin Lyric Opera," said Starbuck. "No one involved in the production right now has formal opera experience."
With the text complete, honoria in ciberspazio's creators are now engaged in another opera tradition: seeking a handout from the nobility to fund completion of the score and the opera's full-scale production.
Of course, today's nobility are the captains of industry, so MacKinnon said the group is looking for corporate sponsors. So far, the group has generated in-kind support from Apple, Shell Oil, and the University of Texas at Austin.
"We're not making cookies; we're building a Boeing Jet, and it takes a lot of time before you have something to show for all your work," noted MacKinnon.
For now, opera fans can sample a few bits of music and video at the opera's Web site. Saturday's performance will feature the aria "Come To Me." The performance will be available via streamed video soon afterwards.
Will "honoria in ciberspazio" revive opera's mainstream appeal? Probably not. Opera has held no central place in popular culture for nearly a hundred years, since the intellectualization and aristocraticization of the so-called "high" arts. In a world of fragmented, sound-bite entertainment consumerism, long-form art - no matter how rich in meaning - rarely reaches more than the converted.
But Starbuck and company are hopeful.
"Opera is an old-fashioned art form with a very strong and evolved background, whereas the Net is fast, it's constantly changing," she said. "When you use the word 'opera' and this new material ... it sort of crosses the borders of these two domains and grounds life on the Internet in a very understandable and classic realm."
