L’Or d’Amazon

Written from unpublished interviews with Amazon warehouse workers, the experience revisits the mythical characters of Wagner’s masterpiece, transposed to today’s world: the Rhinemaidens are the artificial intelligences setting the pace, the slaves forging the gold are the temporary workers labouring night and day, the Valkyries are human resources, the Giants are the unions — and the god Wotan, a Jeff Bezos about to be crushed by his insatiable desire for power.

“This project is also, above all, the result of a strong encounter with Louis, a 22-year-old recent graduate and 3D creator, who had no choice but to work as a temp at Amazon at the end of his studies,” spending his nights in the huge fulfillment center in Brétigny, in the Essonne. Louis agreed to record a daily logbook of his nights: “He describes the places, the atmosphere, the faces, the repetitions, the boredom, the crises, the thefts, the exhaustion, the excitement and the noise — always the throbbing noise, the incessant noise of the machines.” After his year at Amazon, Louis joined Novaya to take charge of the 3D of Noire — and is now co-writing the experience.

“Visitors put on transparent glasses topped with a hard hat and fit an ‘intelligent audio guide’ to their temples. They have been invited to discover a new generation of factory, where the workers are replaced by their holographic doubles, endowed with their skills and their intelligence. ‘Enter a new era.’”

“Visitors enter a huge industrial center, a kind of 21st-century Chaplin Modern Times factory, filled with a hypnotic soundscape. Guided by the ‘daughters of the Amazon’, the artificial intelligences whispering in their ears, visitors meet human holograms who work in the place. […] The specter of Jeff Bezos looms. The cheerful workers reveal their dreams and fantasies. Wagner’s music plunges us into the deep and contradictory emotions of this world and its occupants… then the machine jams, and the apparent perfection of the place begins to crack. The holograms look at us, call out to us; they begin to take us as witnesses to their very tangible reality. Could they be more human than we thought?”

At the boundary of art installation, cinema and sensory immersion: in groups of about fifty, equipped with augmented-reality headsets and bone-conduction headphones, visitors move freely through a built set — completed by video projections on four walls, lighting effects, vibrations and spatialized sound on two levels, collective and intimate. The workers are filmed in volumetric capture: true “three-dimensional films” of the people encountered, rendered as holograms by the streaming technology Novaya has been developing since Noire.

The music draws on Wagner’s leitmotifs — the Gold, the Forge, the Ring, the Tarnhelm turned algorithm — developed with Dominique Pagani and arranger Romain Denuit, for a musical and sound adaptation by Valgeir Sigurðsson and Nicolas Becker.

The physical set is designed by Gabríela Friðriksdóttir and Laurence Fontaine: “We will move through a fantasized, evoked fulfillment center, with more or less real forms, playing with scales” — between the fulfillment center and the mine, between reality and the fantasy of a future. “We are studying the possibility of building the set entirely out of cardboard.” The lights, remotely operated, are implemented with Philippe Berthomé.

Conceived as a modular, touring installation — theaters, museums, immersive venues — set up in two days, on the model of theatrical tours.