a_social_opera Currently in its final stages of script development, FEED will be published in book form later this year, before we present the work as a rehearsed reading set to Dr NoJoke's distinct techno beats in 2024. Our aim has been to create an imagined world in word and sound that would enable us to engage both artistically/aesthetically and critically/ethically with the increasing fragmentation and polarisation of society at a time of global crisis. The work divides into five acts, each dominated by one of the opera’s characters, who address the climate emergency from radically different and isolated points of view. Its plotless narrative materializes via strings of loosely linked monologic echo chambers, dialogues variously disrupted by cancel culture chants, that fail at actual exchange. Online, such texts (social media posts and comments) defy our intuitive assumptions about communication. We perceive them as reciprocal, shared experiences fixed in time and space. In FEED each embodiment of these texts both enacts and exposes the fleeting, transient algorithm-driven construction that they in reality are. Part theatre, part rave, FEED blurs the lines between performer and audience and in so doing allows us to explore at scale topics as dire as the future of life on Earth, whilst at the same time enabling us to co-create an immersive work of great cathartic force. |