Multimedia Opera

Upload is an opera by Dutch composer, director, and librettist Michel van der Aa, with motion capture and real-time graphics by Darien Brito. The work asks a question that feels increasingly close: what if our minds could live forever? Its story follows a father and daughter — he has chosen to have his memories and consciousness transferred to the digital cloud, a procedure that requires the death of his physical body. When his uploaded self returns to her, she must reckon not only with grief but with something harder to name: whether the entity before her is still her father at all.

Motion Capture

The opera unfolds across two timelines. In flashbacks, pre-recorded film documents the origins of the uploading procedure. In the present, live motion-captured projections represent the father's digital avatar, interacting with the daughter in real time as she copes with her loss and is forced to make difficult decisions about his continued existence. Brito built the real-time visual system from the ground up, capturing the lead singer Roderick Williams via an array of Kinect Azure sensors onstage and developing custom tools — now open-source — to translate his live movements into the father's ghostly digital presence.

Recognition

The work won Best Digital Opera at the International Opera Awards in November 2022. Across its run, critics called it a masterly weaving of music, film and motion-capture technology, describing it as a production of unimaginably stunning beauty. It was commissioned by and co-produced with the Dutch National Opera, Oper Köln, Bregenzer Festspiele, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Park Avenue Armory, and the doubleA Foundation.