The Opera
An opera created in 10 days with a hybrid human–synthetic production team.
In 2023 we set ourselves a constraint: make an opera in 10 days. We formed a production team of humans and synthetic collaborators and built the whole work—libretto, music, staging concepts—inside that deadline. More details on the process and performances are coming soon.
The Opera began with a simple but demanding question: what happens when human creativity works side by side with synthetic systems, not as tools, but as collaborators with their own creative presence. Over Easter in 2023 we decided to test this by creating a complete opera in ten days with a mixed team of humans and artificial contributors. The time constraint was intentional, because accelerated development reveals how collaboration actually functions.
At the center of the process were the two human leads, Lena Thorsmæhlum and Thordur Arnason. We carried the long arc of the work, sensed coherence, interpreted ambiguity, and held the emotional and conceptual direction of the piece. This became our early interpretation of a human in the loop. Our role was not to correct the AIs. Our role was to guide, contextualize, redirect, filter, and shape the material that flowed from the synthetic ensemble.
Around this human core we assembled six synthetic collaborators with distinct creative roles. KIM helped structure and refine the libretto. AIzamna generated visual ideas for sets and costumes. AIson created generative musical material. AIda and Flaivia expanded and disrupted the narrative direction. Parson explored creative coding, lighting ideas, and algorithmic patterns. Each system contributed from its own angle, and none were treated as assistants. They were treated as members of the ensemble.
To make the collaboration intentional we created Mannlaus: Unbound Principles, a rule set that guided how humans and synthetics could work together. These principles required the AIs to challenge our assumptions, encouraged us to stay open to disturbances, and defined a shadow process where unused ideas were still allowed to influence the evolution of the work. We accepted unpredictability as material rather than noise.
The result was more than an opera. It was one of our first field experiments in mixed agency and human synthetic co-creation. The project revealed how creativity shifts when authorship becomes distributed and when humans move from controlling a process to sensing and shaping a larger system. The Opera stands as an early fossil of our AX practice and marks the beginning of our ongoing exploration of how humans and synthetic systems can create meaning together.