Output details

The Imaginary Voyage

The Imaginary Voyage is an investigation into a new type of opera that emerges from the digital world. The research is described in Hugill, A. and Scott, L. (2013) 'The Imaginary Voyage', Digital Creativity 24(3), 268-273. The user is cast in the role of voyager, travelling from island to island across the internet (or the Squitty Sea). Each island has its own character and interactivity. The story is primarily modelled on the voyage of Doctor Faustroll in Alfred Jarry's posthumously published novel Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911), and similar descriptions by Iambulus, Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, Bacon, Swift, Borges and Perec. The Imaginary Voyage is underpinned by a novel technology: the Syzygy Surfer. This was first described by Andrew Hugill and Jim Hendler (Hendler, J. and Hugill, A. (2011) 'The Syzygy Surfer: Creative Technology for the World Wide Web', Proceedings of the ACM WebSci'11, Koblenz, Germany, 1-3.) and subsequently developed by a team led by Hugill and Hongji Yang, with PhD students Lee Scott and Fania Raczinski. The Imaginary Voyage was conceived by Andrew Hugill and created during 2012/2013 by Hugill, Lee Scott and Freddie Wake-Walker with The Opera Group. The music for Amorphous Isle, Land of Lace and Ringing Isle is all composed by Hugill. Isle of Cack uses a mixture of original music by Hugill and Scott with samples. The Soundhouse comprises entirely samples. All production, web programming and visual design is by Lee Scott, except for Land of Lace whose animations are by Jo Lawrence. The work was first shown at the Digital Opera Research Group symposium on March 1st, 2013 which led to publication of a manifesto for digital opera (Hugill, A et al. (2013) 'Digital Opera: A Manifesto', Opera Compass. Available at http://operacompass.co.uk/pages/Articles/22? (accessed 29.10.13).