Encounter Machines is a manifesto created by Peter Zuspan that seeks to find new futures for opera from the world of architecture and design. The project originated in a year-long residency with the San Francisco Opera Instigator’s Program, where Zuspan and five other artists and thinkers from different disciplines were brought to San Francisco as outsiders to think about what the future of opera could be. The project would not be possible without the support, openness, and access that the San Francisco Opera granted into the inner workings of their company and this medium.

Encounter Machines, a work-in-progress, takes the form of a series of notes, ideas, musings, images, and margin scribblings that I think hold some offerings to opera. Some of them are literal, some emotional, many incomplete, some of them fleeting.

Below is an excerpt from Encounter Machines, entitled "Brownfield Opera":

Science fiction has mastered the ability to hold ideas and concepts as focal and dramatic as any human narrative. Things have agency, struggle, and dramatic capacity. Science fiction often focuses on the sublime understanding of bigness of the world around us and the infinitesimally small spatial and temporal scale of human existence. This sublime feeling builds in us an emotional relationships with our world, with objects, things, and ideas. We are given time to contemplate our own beautiful frailty.

We are social creatures who love a good interpersonal story. This story is the historic heart of opera narrative. But in pursuit of reestablishing its queerness, opera must focus its amplification skills to the voices of phenomena, ideas, things, and imperatives. There are few mediums that understand bigness like opera, and the world could learn from it.

Bigness loves duration. The construct the Cologne Cathedral lasted 632 years. This time scale should not be a hindrance. The construction of space is itself a performative event.

Opera could own this process.

Brownfield sites coat our modern cities. They represent catastrophic failures of misguided human invention. The remediation and populating or rewilding of these lands is Sisyphean. It is also urgent. Opera could own these spaces. It could make their repair a contemplative and visceral performance.

Some of these brownfield sites are breathtaking and otherworldly. Opera should start there. Stage performances, fragments of performances, experiments, lighting tests, and sound installations. Opera knows tragedy intimately. It knows desolation. It could show architecture and environmentalism how to use tragedy for empathy and action, and could show the world how to move through material, human, and spatial devastation into a new potential for care and experience, folding opera into one of the must urgent global imperatives of our time.