Three Tales (2002)

A video opera in three acts, prepared in collaboration with Beryl Korot. Korot’s projections, fragments of archival films and interviews, as well as texts projected on a large screen, accompany a sound layer played back from samplers and by an electronically-reinforced ensemble of eleven instrumentalists and five singers. The opera’s material is comprised of short stories about three technological turning points which determined the course of 20th-century history. Act I, entitled Hindenburg, alludes to the tragic catastrophe of the German airship which ended the career of airships in tourism and passenger transportation. Act II (Bikini) focuses on the story of several dozen atomic tests conducted by the United States in one of the atolls of the Marshall Islands Archipelago. Act III (Dolly) talks about the most important dilemmas of contemporary times: the hopes and fears associated with cloning, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. In the documentary layer, the creators utilized, among other items, conversations with Kevin Warwick – ‘the first cyborg’, who injected a subcutaneous micro-transmitter into himself; robotics expert Rodney Brooks; Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a distinguished commentator on the Talmud; and famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins.