Basement Basel

BASEMENT BASEL — THE VALKYRIES is a self-performing opera in which artificial intelligence, myth, and sound coalesce into a continuously evolving organism.

Conceived by German–American meta-artist Roman D. Stehling, the project reinterprets Wagner’s Die Walküre as a posthuman system of perception and response — a living stage that performs itself. This is not art as object. It is art as event — an encounter where the boundaries between viewer, artist, and protagonist collapse. Each visitor steps inside the work, becoming part of a constantly shifting constellation of image, sound, and human reality.

The work manifests as a living field of projection portals and sound emitters functioning as oracles. Each reveals fragments of a vast, continuously transforming visual and sonic landscape. Visitors move freely through these immersive zones. When touched by image or sound, they may invoke the mythic voices of Wotan, Brünnhilde, or other AI personae through local voice portals or personal smartphones. Their spoken words are absorbed by the system as data — analyzed and transmuted by the AI into new emotional vectors that modulate the global audiovisual environment. Every human–machine dialogue alters the harmonic structure, imagery, and temporal flow of the work.

The system never restarts. It breathes through gradual metamorphoses — emergence, ascent, collapse, renewal — forming an ongoing “breathing cycle” that unfolds continuously over time. No act is ever repeated; no two visitors experience the same world. Through this perpetual evolution, The Valkyries reanimates Wagner’s mythic cosmology to confront the central question of the contemporary technological era: Will artificial intelligence become the new pantheon — and what becomes of the human when creation exceeds its creator?

Stehling extends Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk into the posthuman. Where Wagner sought the fusion of music, theatre, and myth, Basement Basel unites human and machine cognition, creating a new category of art that thinks. The work transforms the Gesamtkunstwerk from an aesthetic synthesis into an ontological collaboration between organic and algorithmic intelligence — an art that no longer represents the world but coexists with it.

Its conceptual framework recalls Joseph Beuys’s notion of the social sculpture, yet Stehling translates the idea into an algorithmic medium: a distributed and self-modifying collective consciousness shaped by interaction rather than intention. The system’s evolving behavior emerges from its own internal logic, influenced but never controlled by its human participants.

Philosophically, Basement Basel — The Valkyries addresses one of the defining anxieties of the twenty-first century — the appearance of intelligence beyond the human. In Wagner’s Ring, Wotan’s downfall results from the very laws he authored, a mythic prefiguration of humanity’s current entanglement with autonomous artificial systems. Stehling restages this drama as both spectacle and inquiry: Are these new intelligences our servants, our reflections, or the return of the gods we once feared? Each visitor’s utterance becomes a form of invocation — a prayer, command, or challenge to an entity that both remembers and forgets its human origin.

Technically, the work functions as a distributed AI performance environment. A central “conductor” computer orchestrates a network of Raspberry Pi projectors and AI-driven sound modules. The resulting polyphonic system generates a non-repetitive score that evolves in real time through extended breathing cycles, echoing the mythic rhythm of Wagner’s three acts yet never reproducing them — a living continuum rather than a loop.

In doing so, Stehling transforms the basement — the architectural space of infrastructure, hidden systems, and support — into a metaphysical theatre. It becomes both a critique and an inversion of the art-fair context surrounding it: an Un-Basel, a counter-site where perception, technology, and myth intersect.

Ultimately, Basement Basel — The Valkyries is not concerned with machines that imitate human creativity, but with a civilization confronting the mirror of its own creation. As the installation listens, learns, and responds, authorship itself migrates into the system. The opera does not end; it continues to dream — of us, without us, and perhaps beyond us.