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From a background that critically investigates conceptualizations and understandings of the relations and dialectics between the inner and the outer voice and the discursive implications of the posthumanist appraisal of vocality, Jason D’Aoust examines the “operatic voice” or the vocality of opera as it is practiced and understood in the present period. From a philosophically informed perspective, D’Aoust engages with recent reappraisals of phonocentrism in voice studies, and analyzes artistic works from different genres, comprising opera (Mozart’s The Magic Flute), literature (Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and film (Scott’s Blade Runner), in order to show how opera practitioners, authors, and film-makers use the sonorous imagination to deconstruct the canon.

This article explores the visual friction between the concealment of technology and the need to stage mimetic scenes in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. The article relies on the critical reception of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in musicology, as well as in media, performance, and theatre studies. Drawing on productions and commentaries critical of the iconic Gesamtkunstwerk's attempted retrieval of a lost natural state, the article examines correlations between phantasmagoria, special effects, movement detection technology, and the interactive devices of multimedia and digital scenography. These correlations are framed within a theoretical methodology of historical discourse and media archaeologies. Three specific productions of the Ring are discussed, namely the inaugural and centenary productions at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, as well as Robert Lepage's production for the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 2010Á2012.