DOI: 10.17870/bathspa.29582177
title: HAYDN SPACE OPERA (Studio/Stage: Entangling private and public creative spaces through interdisciplinary composition - Portfolio)

description: Virtual reality environment (2019–2024), no fixed duration; visits may take up to c. 30 minutes<i>HAYDN SPACE OPERA</i> is a virtual reality piece created on the Mozilla Hubs browser-based social VR platform. It considers the private creative spaces of my practice, including my notebooks, and rehearsal rooms with my Bastard Assignments colleagues. Every permanent element of this work relates to its creation in some way, with most elements in the work being documentary material created over the course of the piece’s development. This includes images of notebook pages, audio and video recordings of workshop experiments, videos and screenshots of playtests, 3D structures, and an interactive space which loosely parallels the adding of digital objects to a room with my process of adding layers of writing, drawing and collage to my notebooks.The piece forms a metaphor for my composer-performer practice, starting with the development process (‘The Corridor’), then warming up for performance (‘The Warm-Up Room’), the performance itself (‘Phyllida Barlow Playground’ and ‘The Apocalypse’) and all of this interspersed with ongoing development of the piece by working in notebooks (‘The Café’, ‘The Blank Page’) and workshops and other work that continues to shape the piece between performances (‘The Corridor’).The experience of <i>HAYDN SPACE OPERA</i> as it was originally created was different for every visit, shaped by the way the visitor moves through the rooms, experiencing localised and room-wide audio, turning sounds on and off. Multiple visitors could be in the work at the same time, in which case they could converse with one another by voice or text chat, and when others were there, the experience changed again, as turning media on and off would often affect other peoples’ experiences.Caveat<i>HAYDN SPACE OPERA</i> was created to run on Mozilla Hubs, a platform created and hosted by Mozilla. However, in mid-February 2024 Mozilla announced that they would be shutting down the Hubs platform and its development at the end of May 2024. Since that time, <i>HAYDN </i><i>SPACE OPERA</i> is no longer available to explore in virtual reality. For this reason, I have included video walkthroughs of each room of the piece in this submission (in the Walkthroughs folder), and I have also included every significant piece of video and audio material and imagery used in the work in this portfolio. You can find these in the Media folder, where they are organised by room. A 'How to navigate <i>HAYDN SPACE OPERA</i>' document is also included here - while it has no practical role without the Mozilla Hubs incarnation of the piece - it provides a certain sense of how the user would negotiate the virtual spaces of the piece, as does the document of maps, showing the user's path through the whole work, and the dispersion of the various media items in 'The Corridor'.I do have plans to recreate the work in another form, whether using Mozilla’s ‘Community Edition’, the open-source version of Hubs that will continue to exist, or remaking it in something like the Unity game engine, but as Mozilla’s announcement was made only 6 weeks before my submission date, it has not been possible to prepare this yet.