San Diego Opera has announced “Opera Hack 2.0,” an online interdisciplinary event for performing arts and technology experts to share and explore developments in regards to production, presentation, and consumption of opera. The event will be held online and will take place from June 4 to July 2, 2021.

Last year’s Opera Hack saw three winning proposals win $40,000 in funding. This year, San Diego will conduct an industry-wide survey to identify problems, which will form the scenarios encountered by the submitting teams. These focuses will be announced when the survey concludes on March 1.

Interested parties are suggested to have expertise in areas such as technical direction, lighting design, composition, costume design, performance, theater project management, stage direction, scenic design, 3D printing, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, creative coding, A.I. and machine learning, computer vision and haptics, and interactive theater and performance art.

The Advisory Panel will include Jennifer Dautermann, founding director of Classical: NEXT; Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development for the Royal Shakespeare Company; Ryan Hunt, Lead Software Engineer with the Walt Disney Company; Steve Lukas, Head of Developer Relations Engineering at Magic Leap; and Vita Tzykun, founding member of the GLMMR  art collective.

“I’m very happy to announce the second iteration of our groundbreaking Opera Hack, which resulted in a number of proposals that have generated interest worldwide,” shares San Diego Opera General Director, David Bennett. “It is our hope Opera Hack will continue to foster industry wide-learning and collaboration and continue to move our art form forward. Opera Hack could not be possible without the visionary support of OPERA America.”