Thinking Beyond the Human: Design Approaches for Robots and AI in Opera

Opera has historically been a site for developing new and emerging technologies. More recently, opera has proven a rich environment for investigating future scenarios involving human-robot interaction and creating a new class of performers. The explosion of enthusiasm for AI coupled with the ubiquity of machine learning tools have created numerous possibilities for generating creative content in music, poetry, images, and choreography. This article outlines our efforts to explore the creative possibilities of these technologies through dedicated workshop involving researchers from diverse fields. Our goal is to begin thinking beyond the human to investigate what robot performers might look and behave like when designed from a relational, rather than a representational approach. We provide a brief history of robots in opera, including the authors’ prior work developing original opera and dance performances featuring robots and human performers. We contrast these efforts working with existing humanoid robots to building our own robots. We describe our iterative design approach and low-fi prototypes for robotic performers, summarizing key insights from the workshop. Finally, we analyze the outcomes of the workshop and consider the trade-offs involved with working with existing robots and the possibilities for working with open, configurable systems.