Traction Project
Who we are
The music for the Traction operas was written by professional composers; the librettos were the work of established writers.
O Tempo (Somos Nós)
The Traction project has involved thousands of people in the co-creation of the operas, in research, in project management and in many other roles.
Meet our project team
Our team was carefully put together to create a symbiosis of research, business, art and social perspectives; including opera companies, art schools, universities, technology driven institutions and academics from five different countries (ES, PT, NL, IE, FR).
In charge of leading the project, the technology-driven research institute also provided the technological mechanisms to create and test the co-creation stage tool which helped us link stages in separate locations so that performances could be held simultaneously.
For more information, visit Vicomtech website or contact Mikel Zorrilla, Head of Digital Media & Communications at Vicomtech.
Internationally recognised for his contributions to community and participatory art approaches, François has been the coordination of all three of our community operas and has led the social impact analysis.
For more information, visit François's website or contact François.
Coordinators of the largest scale and most ambitious of our community operas with over 1000 local people involved, La Gata Perduda”, performed on 5 and 7 October 2022.
For more information, visit LICEU website or contact Irene Calvís, Coordinator of social projects at Liceu.
Led the co-creation, coordination and subsequent tour of the virtual reality community opera “Out of the Ordinary”, performed during the second half of 2022.
For more information visit Irish National Opera website or contact James Bingham, Studio and Outreach Producer.
Experts in art and music with groups at risk of social exclusion, they led the co-creation, coordination and performances of “O Tempo (Somos Nòs)”, our community opera in a youth training prison in Portugal.
For more information, visit SAMP website or contact Paulo Lameiro, Artistic Director of SAMP.
Leading the technological side of the project, their research and testing led to the creation of the Co-creation Space, a private social media platform which enabled a community dialogue. CWI also researched in experimental Social VR interactions for novel audiovisual formats.
For more information, visit Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica website or contact Pablo César, Head of Distributed and Interactive Systems at CWI.
Provided a human-driven perspective, leading our ethics and community-centric evaluation methodology which allowed us to measure the community dialogue, the co-creation process and the performances.
For more information, visit Autonomous University of Barcelona website or contact Anna Matamala, Professor and Head of Transmedia Catalonia research group at UAB.
Technology-driven, their research focus and algorithm enabled us to develop and strengthen the technological tools that we created that went on to assist with co-creation.
For more information, visit Dublin City University website or contact Gabriel Miro-Muntean, Professor at the School of Electronic Engineering at DCU.
Experts in Immersive 360-degree content and cutting-edge technologies, they were responsible for producing our virtual reality community opera.
For more information, visit Virtual Reality Ireland website or contact Terry Madigan, CEO at Virtual Reality Ireland.
Meet our advisory board
To enrich our knowledge and keep the project on the course we put together an Advisory Board of experts in the fields of academia, technology and the performing arts, whose role it was to guide and steer us towards the best possible outcomes.
The team included:
Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin. His research group V-SENSE is on visual computing with focus on immersive technologies such as AR, VR, volumetric video, 360 video, and light fields (Trinity College Dublin).
Professor Emeritus of Education and Evaluation at the University of Southampton, UK, and an independent evaluation consultant of education and social innovations (University of Southampton).
Senior Project Manager at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Sustainable Development Programme (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal).
Director of the Department of Theatre, Film, TV and Interactive Media at the University of York.
Director of Streetwise Opera and With One Voice, the international arts and homelessness movement and network.
Director of the Creative Ireland Programme, an initiative of the Government of Ireland to put creativity at the centre of public policy.
General Director of Birmingham Opera Company, who create large-scale performances in extraordinary places.
