Uploading into Eternity

Upload, an opera by composer, director, and librettist Michael van der Aa, performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik, Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, March 22–30, 2022.Michael van der Aa’s Upload adroitly presents humankind’s inextricable woes as it embraces the spate of technological innovations that humanity might experience in the foreseeable future—if we, the human species, survive the climate emergency and the specter of nuclear annihilation. The opera focuses on the conundrum of uploading one’s consciousness to the computing cloud and the complexities of maintaining a digitized rebirth after death. This transformation lassoes a host of troubling ethical, moral, and psychological controversies into the fray, including the core existential question: “to be or not to be?” Once the main character, the Father, uploads his consciousness to the cloud—does he exist—or not exist?The sparseness of the production stands in contrast to the current surfeit of new media art razzle-dazzle trends thrown at contemporary audiences, like bundling together prerecorded holograms, augmented reality, live performance, dance, sculpture, liturgical readings, audience interaction, and painting in order to wrestle viewers into a sensory overload of appreciating their creator’s technical wizardry. For Upload, the opposite is true. The production explores technological innovation in the service of a question, not of state-of-the-art spectacle. The incredibly skilled use of motion capture volumetric technology by Darien Brito gives the theatricality a honed focus. At different moments throughout the performance, the Father blends realties by walking to the edge of the stage and standing in front of volumetric scanning cameras that project his dissolving and reforming avatar onto a series of bare scrim framesets. This stripped-down approach allows the audience to share in the creation of the oversized (and totally believable) smoke and mirrors fantastical imagery. The screens used throughout the performance, designed by Theun Mosk, are varied: overhead scrims, unfurled scrims, a large projection screen for high-definition video, and three simple portable wooden frames. These frames are pushed back and forth across the stage not by stagehands, but by the actors themselves, deconstructing the story as they double up on their roles while still playing their characters.The performance explores the relationship between the Father (baritone Roderick Williams) and his Daughter (soprano Julia Bullock) and is the final part of van der Aa’s operatic triptych that includes After Life and Sunken Garden. It blurs digital into analog, so the digitized Father easily slips back and forth into a human flesh and blood character. The tension arises from the duo’s powerful arias about the dematerialized/materialized Father’s need to remain a volumetric doppelgänger of zeroes and ones. This contrasts with his very much alive-and-kicking Daughter’s escalating obstreperousness at the temerity of his attempting to do so in the first place, as she stridently sings to his digitized doppelgänger, “I am certain you do not exist.”For the prelude the opera’s English-language libretto, written by van der Aa, is projected onto an overhead scrim. Visceral senses and body parts erupt through cascading phrases: the heart aches, you lose your appetite, memory carries loss. A live orchestral score, also composed by van der Aa, and played with intensity yet impeccable restraint by Ensemble Musikfabrik (conducted by Otto Tausk), breaks apart, dissolves, and reforms. The volumetric disassembled point-cloud Father laments, “I have lost the habit of dreaming,” but insists that he is, nonetheless, still present. He suddenly leaves his projected and digitized state in order to physically walk onto the stage as a live human, a shocking and unexpected encounter for the audience. High-definition cinematic flashbacks shot by Joost Rietdijk resemble a 1970s Soviet sci-fi movie set, revealing the Father’s memory from three months’ prior, merging the cinematic with the operatic and the digital. Seven actors on film, portraying scientists and psychologists at “The Institute,” prep him for the brain scan that will upload for all of eternity his biological, psychological, and “mind spiral” consciousness. He agonizes about saying goodbye to his corporeal body, including the crippling psychological grief and depression he experiences from his wife’s passing. The Institute’s staff soothe him: “We have to trust technology is taking us where we need to go.” The upload records a scan of his actual brain, etching it onto his artificial brain in a series of dazzling cinematic special effects by Julius Horsthuis. The caveat to this process is that his original brain must be destroyed, with no copy allowed to exist.The Daughter, in a heart-wrenching and full-throated aria, decries her Father’s choice as she “believes in my body more than my soul,” while the Father laments “what is left of me is no longer.” A volumetric point-cloud scan completes his corporeal dissolution into a total digital upload. The procedure is supposed to erase trauma, although he is warned that brains can and do derail, becoming disoriented when deprived of the neural feedback of haptic touch. To counteract this disorientation, a “memory anchor” is necessary for each individual upload. Memory anchors stamp a customized social and personal imprint, but traumatic memories could still lurk in the background. The music shifts becoming more languid as a nostalgic past soothes the disruption of total dissolution. The Father chooses salamanders as his anchor, representing a happy moment from his childhood. The Daughter freaks out, insisting that her Father, as she once knew him, no longer exists. He wants her to upload a brain scan just as he has done, with his vocals measured and precise, in contract to her raw emotionality. She vehemently insists that is impossible, because she exists “in her senses and body.” He reveals the memory of his trauma was not removed, lamenting he got a raw deal. A “medical movie” of blood cells and platelets is then projected as the Daughter sings, “this is who you (really) are.”A crescendo occurs when the uploaded Father, neither dead nor alive, and terrified of being left alone, begs his Daughter to delete him. She admonishes him—“What you did not dare in your own life you dare in mine?”—for attempting to coerce her into performing an assisted suicide. In his deep baritone, the Father sorrowfully explains that he thought he was escaping trauma, but even death could not liberate him. He realizes too late that life is liberated only when one molecule says yes to another, and thus life is born.A surprise scrim unfurls from the ceiling, practically dropping onto the audience’s head. A split screen projects the Father and Daughter lying head-to-head on separate beds. The visceral words from the prelude repeat: the heart aches, you lose your appetite, memory carries loss. Images dissolve into color fields conjuring up the salamander “memory anchor.” As the images disappears, I wondered: did the Daughter upload herself, did she dissolve back into the Father, or did she finally dissolve him as he had just begged her to do?Though adroit and profound, aspects of Upload mimic the 1962 potboiler sci-fi movie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, where a young doctor and his beautiful fiancée are in a car accident, and she is decapitated. The doctor recovers her severed head, reviving it in a liquid-filled tray. The fiancée’s new existence is agony, and she pleads with the doctor to let her die. He ignores her and she resents him, even though he shares with her his plot to murder a stripper, using her body to fuse to his fiancée’s head. Eventually both die, released from their mutual suffering. Van der Aa has updated the mythical fear of damned eternal life as retribution for tinkering with nature. He has done so with grace, pathos, and innovation instead of traditional fire and brimstone.