Il ratto di Europa (The rape of Europe)

"The rape of Europe" originated from the experience of La Nave Argo, a short multi-location theatrical piece showcased during the Innovating Colosseo event. This initiative marked the launch of a new fiber-optic network connecting the Colosseum, Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, and the venues of the National Roman Museum (Crypta Balbi, Palazzo Altemps, Palazzo Massimo, and the Baths of Diocletian).

Live interaction between remote places

The show "Il ratto di Europa" works like a time machine and this is made possible thanks to the GARR network, which allows you to connect virtually exceptional sites in an experimentation that fragments the scenic space, reuniting distant places in a single representation digitally increased.

Multiple points of view for a unique show

The Octagonal Hall of the Baths of Diocletian and Palazzo Altemps are the two places that host the public. The actors interact from the two locations thanks to the ubiquity of the network, while the spectators live the performance from two different perspectives. These two sites of the Special Superintendency for the Colosseum and the central archaeological area of Rome are connected by fiber optics from the GARR network as well as the other sites where the scene takes place: Crypta Balbi and National Laboratories of Frascati of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics.

Beyond the current Internet: emotion runs on the fiber

The novelty, from the technological point of view, as result of GARR research and experimentation, is the possibility of transmitting audio-video signals directly on the optical fiber without using the traditional model of Internet transmission, based on the Internet Protocol (IP). The locations of the show are interconnected with each other through a dedicated lightpath: an absolute novelty in the context of a live artistic performance. In this way, the show really goes at the speed of light, which on the optical fiber travels at about 200 thousand kilometers per second: from here, the idea of calling this type of experimentation C-theater.

The technology chosen is a creative reuse of hardware elements already available at the commercial level, engineered to make the experience from the point of view of the performers on the one hand and the audience on the other as transparent as possible. Objective: to make the system available to the theater team without the need for support from network technicians. So, from the point of view of the director, the use of a remote or local camera is almost equivalent, while the latency introduced by a remote actor has been kept at 3 milliseconds, far below that of a normal camera used in this type of setup and well below the human perception threshold (50 ms).

A multidisciplinary collaboration

Archeology and optical fiber, theater and networking, actors and musicians interact at very high definition from distant locations. Past, present and future fused in a virtual environment thanks to the use of new languages and distr-active (distributed and interactive) technologies, which allow us to go beyond the network as we know it today.

From the beginning, GARR has kept alive the attention for the live arts community through collaborations with avant-garde realities, exploiting innovative technologies and thus promoting a contamination of knowledge between scientific and humanistic disciplines.