Neuromoon. Kollaborative Arbeit im Kontext von Musiktheater [Artist Talk]

Sara Glojnarić in conversation with Emma Braslavsky

Had a bad day? How you remember it tomorrow is up to you! What do you want your memory to be like? Less embarrassing? Extravagant? Or simply bearable? Welcome to the center of your desires, in the office that for »positive alternate endings.« Here, rehearsed memories are treated. But how much change can a person tolerate, before the human system collapses? Author Emma Braslavsky and composer Sara Glojnarić have designed an exciting puzzle game together, in which it becomes impossible to differentiate between memories, the real present, and the corrected past.

The opera »NEUROMOON. Manage your Memories« – originally performed in May 2023 at Theater Freiburg – is a piece about memory and identity in times of total personalization, to forget and to remember right and duty. It is a piece about an app, with which the affected could consciously change their memory and overwrite memories with the help of AI. NEUROMOON develops quickly and furiously into the most used app in Germany, and soon on the whole planet. Everywhere, people overwrite hard and unpleasant memories; NEUROMOON throws the world into downright ecstasy. With this popularity, lawmakers start to have doubts, whether the hard memories shouldn’t be kept conscious, and if they can be allowed to be deleted so easily. After all, they present factual history there that should be preserved. Thus, they force the startup to preserve the deleted memories anonymously and encrypted as quasi-cultural assets. But that’s just the start of the problems …

Composer Sara Glojnarić and author Emma Braslavsky speak with each other about collaborative work in the context of musical theater, artificial intelligence, and of course their joint opera »NEUROMOON«.