Empire at Sea

Peter Flaherty is a director and interactive artist whose work has shown in over a hundred international venues, including theaters, galleries, and museums. He conceived and directed The Dial, an interactive narrative combining augmented reality & projection mapping, which premiered at Sundance in 2019. He created and directed The Surrogate, a groundbreaking Virtual Reality narrative that melds 360 video with a computer-generated explorable environment, which was a SXSW Interactive Innovation Award Finalist in 2016. He was Creative Director for Marvel Studios and Disney’s Eternals AR, a companion piece to Chloé Zhao’s feature film, which was released in November 2021. He created interactive media for three productions at the Metropolitan Opera in New York that are still in their active repertory: Lohengrin, which premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 2022 and at the Met in 2023, an interactive version of The Flying Dutchman in 2020 featuring a live motion-captured virtual character, and a massive, 5-hour video projection for Parsifal in 2012. On Broadway, he created the Video and Projection Design for Roundabout Theatre’s Sondheim on Sondheim, which was later adapted for HBO’s documentary film, Six by Sondheim. His large-scale video installation, Pass Back a Revolver, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. He has designed video projections and interactive art for installations, performances, and concerts that have toured the world with The Builders Association, Complicite, Big Dance Theater, Basil Twist, and many others. His video art has been shown at such venues as the MIT Media Lab and the home of Agnes Gund (President Emerita of MOMA). He has received grants from the Rockefeller MAP Fund, The New York State Council on the Arts, Doris Duke Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Agog, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. He is a Professor at CalArts.