A DRONE OPERA Set for Arts House

Artist Matthew Sleeth directs an experimental multimedia performance featuring drones, their pilots and opera singers, combined with a new sound score, laser light design and moving image.

A Drone Opera viscerally explores the rapidly developing technology of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), colloquially known as drones, and their social and cultural impact.

Feeling the drones' air displacement and hearing their rotor sound, audiences will experience this robotic technology first hand, shifting their knowledge of drones from political abstraction into embodied experience in time and space.

Curious about their potential to reshape our world, Sleeth has designed, built and programmed customised drones specifically for the performance context.

Sleeth's largest work to date, A Drone Opera also features an inspiring line-up of collaborators, including experimental artists Kate Richards, Robin Fox,Phil Samartzis and Susan Frykberg, lighting designer Bosco Shaw and choreographer Shelley Lasica.

An Australian contemporary visual artist who lives and works between Melbourne and New York, Sleeth's conceptually driven practice includes sculpture, photography, video and public installation.

Sleeth's work has been widely collected and exhibited throughout Australia (including at the National Gallery of Victoria as part of Melbourne Now) and internationally including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Cologne, Berlin and Venice.