It will probably be a mortal sin, but Michiel van der Aa managed to hit me in a place where you shouldn't hit a serious journalist. And world-famous opera maker Michiel van der Aa probably does not want to be associated with a cult series from the last century. Alas.
Indeed, this journalist should confess out loud that he has been a Star Trek fan since the series appeared on Dutch Saturday morning TV in the early 1970s, shortly after, or shortly before, Max Euwe's chess course.
With his latest VR composition 'From Dust', the composer who loves to explore strange new worlds shows the next generation of immersive art. In short, the holodeck of the Enterprise-D materialised during this Holland Festival on the foyer deck of the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, known to insiders as of now as 10 Vooruit. So that's out.
Vertigo
I was one of the lucky ones allowed to wander for a good 15 minutes in a world populated by unearthly beautiful singing sirens, who ended up giving me another mild attack of vertigo as they took me past scenes from my softest dreams. I saw myself in the mirror and it was good.
By the way, you will never find me at a Comic Con reciting Klingon poems in a lycra uniform: a 'Trekkie' I am not. It runs deeper. The world created in the 1960s in the mind of American producer Gene Roddenberry was a world where, growing up as a child of a traumatised war generation, you would love to be. In Star Trek, there were no more racial distinctions, there were gender-diverse types running around, and everything was resolved completely peacefully, except for the occasional fistfight. Hell, those were other planets. Not ours. Each episode faced a different moral dilemma. Shooting planets to God, they only did that in Star Wars.
Real art in VR
As 'woke' as Star Trek was before it became a swear word, the 'franchise' remains innovative, having produced so many series by now that even hardcore fans lost track. The last series featured a fully sung episode that caused serious divisions among followers.
It is all very much Michiel van de Aa in form and content, that Star Trek. And where in that series the 'Holodeck' was designed as a cheap opportunity for the writers to add even more unlikely locations and storylines to the series, 'From Dust', the opera van der Aa made entirely in VR, is a very expensive solution to add real art to the Virtual Reality world populated by nerds a gamers. For serious people who don't do SF.
Hard light
Mission accomplished: this geek foresees something no one has yet gone to in Van der Aa's work. It all takes an awful lot of time and money to put something like this together, so the cost per spectator will be astronomical, but these are events and innovations you want to witness. Someday there will come a time when Van der Aa ''harsh light' invent, so you can touch all that beauty damage-free too. In the meantime, keep following him. The mission will go on for a while.
