In the following days the multimedia interactive opera METATOPIA will be presented in Madrid , an unprecedented co-production organized by 9 institutions from 6 different countries and coordinated by Jaime del Val of REVERSE collective, based in Madrid. In METATOPIA the scenic limits are transcend in a set of performances and urban facilities that involved the most advanced proposals of interactive digital art. This production has been generated as part of the European project Metabody, involving 38 institutions from 16 countries.
METATOPIA is an opera without song or scene in which the bodies of the participants generate sound with their movement and voices are processed electronically in real time, a new type of complete artwork that crosses all senses and unconventional spaces by new participatory formats.
The proposal has a headquarters in Medialab-Prado from 22 to 25 of July in several passes from 16:30 to 20:30. It will take place at the auditorium, where it will be possible to experience a series of 15 performances and interactive installations: a proposal with new participatory formats in which the public can experience subtle changes of its perception and where interactive architecture will be physically transformed by the movement. Some of these facilities will be drawn every night between 20 and 25 of July on the streets of Madrid. On July 20th there will be a special session in AZCA, in an attempt to regenerate this urban space with artistic actions of METATOPIA.
Blurring the lines between reality and fiction, METATOPIA is also a platform of metagaming, an expanded game that has been brought to reality, which opens the scenic format to new participatory formats dealing with the problem of social control through technology by introducing a possible science fiction future -which actually could be the present- in which humans are part of a great world ciberorganism that records everything, the Big Data Brother. The different scenes of the opera, as performances and interactive multimedia installations, staged modes to escape of that control by modifying behavior and perception. METATOPIA is the indeterminate and non-control spaces generated by the bodies of the interactors challenging technological control in the era of Big Data. With the caption Occupy 2.0 makes a nod to the 15M movement with new forms of urban intervention and responses to social control.
The presentations are preceded by nine days of production at Medialad Prado in which the participation is opened to public. And it also includes an international conference about Hacking Big Data Brother at La Casa Encendida on July 21 and 22, that will expose a debate on the body as a tool against massive vigilance.
It's all part of the International METABODY Forum 2015 Madrid, the annual meeting in Madrid of the European project METABODY that proposes alternatives to cultural homogenization through the development of new technologies that take into account the complexity of corporeal and non-verbal communication. The forum brings together over 50 international pioneers of the convergence of art, technology, humanities and activism. American feminist Karen Barad, from the University of California at Santa Cruz, combining quantum physics with the performativity of gender, will be the guest star of the conference in la Casa Encendida the 21st and 22nd of July. The specialist in robotics and emotions Kevin LaGrandeur from the New York Institute of Technology, the engineer Adrian Freed from the University of Berkeley, the German philosopher Stefan Sorgner, the specialist in bioethics, the artist Shu Lea Cheang, from Paris with her new film project FLUID0, the dancer Muriel Romero, or the developer Marije Baalman are some of the more than 50 specialist pioneers in their field that will gather at the forum, coordinated by the artist from Madrid Jaime del Val.
Metatopia 1.0 is a phase of the METABODY project, which will continue to develop until 2017 when it will take the form of an interactive pavilion that, as a barrack of the 21st Century and expanding pioneer projects such as Polytopes by the architect and composer Iannis Xenakis, will tour through Europe performing in the streets and squares of 9 cities.
CREDITS.-
Venue.- Medialab-Prado, 15 Alameda street, 28014 Madrid.
Dates.- from 20 to 25 of July, 2015.
