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New York Times

An Opera Takes A.I., Pronatalism and Hustle Culture to Space

If contemporary music sometimes feels like a perilous glacier to scale, then the works by the Irish composer Jennifer Walshe are more like climbing walls, with an abundance of reachable footholds to get you started and handholds to grasp if you get lost. In the past, Walshe has created 'Aisteach,' a fictional history of the musical and artistic avant-garde in Ireland, and 'Personhood,' about personal agency in an era of technofeudalism and surveillance capitalism. Her latest project, 'Mars,' which the Irish National Opera will premiere on Friday in Galway before the production travels to Dublin next month, continues in a similar, ideas-heavy vein. The Irish National Opera has described 'Mars' as 'about space colonization, reactionary futurism, pronatalism, the madness of hustle culture and the unsettling futures encroaching on our present.' Add to the list: fate, resistance, artificial intelligence, labor, the non-neutrality of technology, melancholy and loss. Mark O'Connell wrote the libretto. A journalist and author, he published the book 'To Be A Machine' (2017), a gonzo-style travelogue of encounters with members of the transhumanism movement, who believe that the evolution of humanity involves some integration of technology into people's bodies. Similar themes crop up in the opera: Four female astronauts board a spaceship in hope of preserving the human race on a new planet, only for their mission to be privatized halfway through the journey by a venture capitalist, their liberated lives suddenly jeopardized. Of the many questions 'Mars' asks of contemporary society, one of the most pressing is what happens when the future is sold off. In the opera, the imposition of a powerful pronatalist ideology, and set pieces like a soliloquy for a Marswife (a take on the tradwife trend) and an A.I. spaceship console's transformation into a productivity-obsessed fitness instructor, the implication is that this privatized future is actually regressive. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.