Opera on Brainwaves by Jasna Rok Lab & Elise Caluwaerts

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, Artes Law, FlyingGroup, Manley pr, Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Starsky, The Beacon, Universiteit Antwerpen, professor David Caruso and de Vlaamse Overheid.

Video made by Kyky Kong Kong