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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a> episode that caused serious divisions among followers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n