On Friday April 9 (2007) I was at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich for the opening of the Opera Calling project. Opera Calling is an exhibition and performance created by the Bitnik media collective and artist Sven Koenig, to be running at the Cabaret Voltaire till the 2nd of May.

Entering into the (maybe not very Dadaist…) refurbished space of Cabaret Voltaire, I follow the steps down to the crypt to visit Opera Calling. I first see a forest of cables and phone receivers: 100 white phones are attached to the ceiling while their receivers bounce down into the gallery space. Moving through the upside-down phone forest, I can see two computer screens in a corner, with information flashing. Occasionally, I can hear the familiar sound of dialling a number and a phone ringing. Listening to a receiver, I find that, most of the time, I can listen to the opera… That is not some recorded opera concert played back to the gallery visitors. If one is familiar with the programme of the Zurich Opera, s/he will soon realise that s/he can listen to the performance currently taking place at the Opera House! Of course, the sound is very ‘dirty’ but that Friday, we did listen to La Boheme -along with everybody else in the Opera House. The difference was that we didn’t pay for a ticket or have to visit the Opera House physically. Instead, the opera itself called out to reach us, visitors to the Cabaret Voltaire, and Zurich residents in their homes…

The artists describe Opera Calling as an intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera. They have secretly placed bugs within the Opera House’s auditorium and redistributed the performances not through public broadcasting but through calling up individuals in Zurich on their landlines. As soon as the opera performance starts, a machine calls out Zurich phone numbers. If a Zurich resident replies, they can hear a computerised message explaining what they are about to listen to and then a live transmission of the performance in the Opera House. The gallery space visitors witness this interaction: they can see which phone number the machine is calling and what the outcome is: will someone answer? Will they hang up? Will an answering machine come up? Will the person on the phone listen to the opera? When someone at the other end of the line picks up the phone, the telephones in the exhibition, like the telephone at this person’s house, are connected to the opera.

Bitnik and Koenig talk about exploring the usefulness of an artistic production strategy. Opera Calling is a hacking project: it hacks through a quite rigid cultural and social system, aiming to open this up to the general public. Andrius Kulikauskas uses the term ‘social hacker’ in a paper published in the Journal of Hyper(+)drome to describe a person who encourages activity amongst online groups and is willing to break social norms. I suggest that this is exactly what the OC artists do: by performing a real but also symbolic act of hacking (the sound of the live opera transmission becomes so transformed that there is no way someone who intended to visit the opera in the first place would decide to go to the gallery and listen to the performance instead. In that sense, hacking into the Opera House becomes less a ‘stealing’ of the performance and more a symbolic act that makes a point around issues of open culture) the OC artists come up with an idiosyncratic solution to what they consider a problem: the ‘closed-circuit’ opera culture that seems to be preserving a class system due to the prohibitive for many, cost of the opera tickets.

Kulikauskas describes the hacker approach as ‘practical’, ‘nonstandard’, and ‘unexpected’ [ibid]. I think these adjectives very much describe the OC project: it employs simple, practical means like bugs built from cheap, readily available technology to perform what is a nonstandard action (how often does the opera call you at your home?…) with unexpected aesthetic outcomes. I thought that Opera Calling is an excellent project, as it cleverly appropriates the found content and social symbolism of the opera to create a new piece that can stand both as an artwork and as an act of social intervention. Within this context, it becomes completely disengaged from any negative connotations that it may carry and, to my eyes, at least, turns into a playful act of uncanny transformation and original creation. What I missed in this project is the involvement of the home audiences and gallery visitors in this action as something more than what they would be if they were in the Opera House – that is, audiences /witnesses. I think OC has potential in audience intervention, communication, and community building, which it cannot fulfil as a ‘sleek’ gallery-based installation. I hope to see many more ‘dirty’ versions of it in the future…

The story so far, according to an email update I just received (29 March 2007): `’For the last two weeks, Opera Calling has retransmitted ten live performances of the Zurich opera to 1489 households in Zurich. The Zurich Opera claims to have found and destroyed two bugs. With the Opera in frantic mode and an unknown number of bugs still to find, the *spectacle* continues…??_