The Traction Legacy Social and cultural diversity is manifest in all our lives, our food, our media, our literature, ever more in each generation. The world is changed. Enriched. At this time of renaissance, opera, our art form that has a claim to be universal, has its greatest opportunity to demonstrate such capacity to those on its doorstep. Traction was a three-year European research project which aimed to contribute to opera’s renewal as a territory of cultural and social inclusion. It did so through three exploratory [...]

Digital and artistic tools to combat social exclusion: presentation of results of the SO-CLOSE and TRACTION co-creation projects The research and innovation projects SO-CLOSE (coordinated by the Autonomous University of Barcelona -UAB) and TRACTION (led by the Catalan company Vicomtech and with the participation of the UAB) will present their main results on Wednesday 30 November at 10:00 am at the headquarters of the European Commission in Barcelona Over the last three years, the research teams of the European projects SO-CLOSE and TRACTION have been working on [...]

The Odd Couple François Matarasso – 5 October 2022 In Neil Simon’s Broadway play, The Odd Couple, two divorced men agree to share an apartment. They are, of course, wildly unsuited to living together. Uptight, neurotic Felix and carefree, untidy Oscar find each other intolerable. It’s a simple dramatic device, made memorable by great performances from Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau who starred in the 1968 film. And, like many simple stories, The Odd Couple has a gentle lesson, as Oscar and Felix both learn from [...]

The Art of VR Facilitation Camille Donegan (Virtual Reality Ireland) – 20 September 2022 Virtual Reality facilitators, or hosts as we prefer to call them, are paramount to audience members having a positive virtual reality experience. The user journey is everything, particularly when it is their first time trying the medium. The comfort of the user in the headset is imperative and the new list of considerations vary from the audience members wondering “where's my stuff going to be when I'm in the headset” to “will [...]

Policy Roundtable — Co-designing an inclusive Europe Migrations and migrants in the EU: Changing narratives – modifying practices – influencing policies Brussels, March 1st, 2022 (08:30-16:00) CET. Join us live in Brussels on March 1st or watch the broadcast. This Policy roundtable is based on findings from ten H2020 projects. Including migrants in the European Union has not been a uniform process and has revealed several obstacles in the path of making the inclusion and integration of people on the move efficient, humane, [...]

Development of the Co-creation Space in the Second Year Alina Stiner (CWI) – 28th January 2022 A main goal of the TRACTION project is to support social transformation of inequality, using technology to help diverse communities across the European Union participate in the creation of opera. To support artistic co-creation with these communities, we are developing the Co-Creation Space (CCS), a platform that supports professionals and community members from diverse backgrounds to engage in creative discussion about media in a “safe space.”In the first year, we gathered an [...]

Fourth meeting with the International Advisory Board Susannah Fraser (UAB) – 19th January 2022 As the third and final year of project gets into its stride, members of the TRACTION consortium met online for the fourth time with the project’s international advisory board (ICAT) on January 17th 2022. The ICAT comprises several experts from the fields of academia, technology and performing arts whose role it is to observe, guide and offer feedback to the TRACTION consortium on the fulfillment of the project objectives. At the meeting were [...]