Introducing... Klara Kofen

Klara is an artist, dramaturg, writer and researcher. She is the artistic director of Waste Paper Opera, a hybrid collective that creates multimodal performance pieces at the intersection of opera, technology and research. Her work is concerned with histories, speculative, counterfactual, real and imagined and the way technological interfaces shape our relation to time and affect. Recent works include ‘fake & extinct’ (Centrale Fies, 2025), ‘Admiror, or revolutionary sentiments’ (Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2024), ‘Dead Cat Bounce - an oratorio about finance and catastrophe’ (Waste Paper Opera UK Tour, Eastside Projects, Nottingham Contemporary, Arts Catalyst, 2024), and ‘110 Fathoms’ (Matt’s Gallery, London). Her writing has been published in the anthology Catastrophe Time! (Gary Zhexi Zhang, MIT Press/Strange Attractor, 2023) and by Onomatopee. Klara works at the Bookartbookshop and occasionally investigates international trade shows. She studied history at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford, and was a fellow on the Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s Opera Making course. She was born into a Greek/Polish family and grew up in a commune in Düsseldorf.

As part of her Creative Fellowship at UCL, Klara is examining the infrastructures of affect: how emotion, intention and meaning are interpreted, codified or misread across political, ecological and computational systems.

Rooted in her interest in history and how heterogenous historical data beyond text is translated into narrative and meaning, she is currently investigating the intersections between historical gesture systems—such as Baroque performance—and contemporary technologies of affect recognition, with a focus on multimodal sentiment analysis. These AI systems attempt to extract and assess ‘authenticity’, intention and user sentiments by aligning facial expression, gesture, voice and text. Of particular interest is how these systems handle temporal misalignment, when affective signals contradict one another across different channels, and how messy data reveals other, stranger infrastructures of affect and meaning. 

Increasingly, these technologies are being adopted by not only brands, but also intelligence agencies and defence companies seeking to quantify what’s now being referred to as ‘fanbase karma’—an emergent metric of public sentiment that merges emotional analysis with predictive modelling. 

As an artist and dramaturg, Klara is interested in what happens when sentiment is recast into the machinic, the infrastructural, the atmospheric or the historically situated. How do contradictions—between gesture and voice, image and sound, system and subject—reveal other, stranger logics of interpretation?

Photo credit: Roberta Segata, courtesy of Centrale Fies