Brain Opera: Exploring Surveillance in 360-degree Immersive Theatre

Noor: A Brain Opera is the first full opera where a performer, wearing a wireless EEG headset, triggers videos, a sonic environment, and a libretto with her brainwaves. The brainwaves are also displayed in live-time as the performer interacts with audience members within the confines of a 360-degree immersive theatre, and a dramatic story is narrated between the performer and me. Noor had its world premiere at ISEA 2016 Hong Kong (International Society for Electronic Art) on May 18, 2016. As I conceived and directed the work, its theme was loosely framed around the following metaphorical question: Is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go? Through images, sonic environment, pre-recorded libretto, and spoken narrative, the opera presented the true story of the life of Noor Inayat Khan, a Sufi Muslim Princess and covert British operative inside Nazi-occupied France, who was murdered at Dachau. It touched upon issues of memory, faith, and the locus of self in light of increasingly invasive and sophisticated surveillance technologies. The performance also worked with the bodies of both the performer and participants by creating a responsive feedback loop in which the performer's interactions with the audience—through movement, gaze, touch, and speech—visibly changed the performer's brainwaves.

Noor: A Brain Opera explores the life of a young woman, Noor Inayat Khan, whose father Hazarat Inayat Khan brought Sufism to the West early in the twentieth century. Noor, born in Moscow of an American mother and Indian father, grew up in a peaceful household outside of Paris. When she was thirteen her father suddenly passed away while on a pilgrimage in India, leaving Noor and her mother in charge of her younger siblings. World War II broke out and the family moved to England for safety. Unable to stand idly by as the war unfolded, Noor as a young adult entered British secret intelligence training as a covert wireless operator. After some months, she was parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to track the movements of the Nazis in Paris. At one point, she was the only communications link back to the Allies. Living between a number of safe houses, Noor was betrayed and arrested three times (escaping each time) before finally being sent to Dachau, where she was shot and executed. During her imprisonment, Noor never divulged any information concerning her training or collaborators. This fact provided an underlying theme in my work, one which directly related to my questions about the relationship between surveillance and human consciousness, especially human biometric indicators—most notably the human brain.

The opera was in development for two years. Once I developed a working proof of my concept that brainwaves could indeed trigger visuals, sound, and speech, I contacted a Max/MSP programmer in New York, Tommy Martinez, who developed a patch to trigger different brainwave patterns according to four different mental states. I then enlisted sonic artist Taras Mashtalir, and librettist and electronic poet Natali Fedorova, both from St. Petersburg, Russia, to begin composing a score and a background libretto. The performance text would be based on both a biography of Noor, titled Spy Princess, as well as the film Enemy of the Reich, which was about her life. Saba Arat, a musician from Istanbul who lives in Hong Kong, was the performer. Technical director William Wong and choreographer David Leung were also Hong Kong-based. The process of making this brain opera focused initially on the story, and how to suggest the main character's interior mental states, as well as on the coding of the technical implementations. Collaborations often took place between New York, St. Petersburg, and Hong Kong using a combination of Skype and Team Viewer, which allowed different programmers to take control of the computer screen in Hong Kong and debug recalcitrant software code.

The sonic score, the pre-recorded libretto, and the videos were contained inside four electronic databanks that corresponded to the emotions of excitement, interest, meditation, and frustration. These databanks would be triggered according to pre-set thresholds that were calibrated during rehearsals with the performer. For example...