SLUG!

SLUG! is a multimedia opera that inhabits the slippery terrain of relationships mediated through the internet. Told through the unconscious mind of a teenager in their first online romance, the work stages a paranoid mythology of our digital age, in which gods are recast as corporations, omniscience is exercised through data-tracking, and intimacy is perpetually surveilled by the devices through which it is shared.

The performance begins with a five-minute hypnotic induction, guiding listeners into a heightened, suggestible state that blurs attention and vulnerability. From there, the piece unfolds like the internet itself: overstimulating, full of red herrings, and saturated with more information than any single mind can hold. Animation and surround-sound music trace the nervous system at its breaking point, negotiating attention economies that turn leisure into profit and connection into content. The score’s quick cuts between genres and its low-budget, “YouTube-style” aesthetics recall the hyper-accessibility of online platforms, where both desire and dread are always just one click away.

SLUG! asks what it means to come of age in an environment where every impulse is tracked, amplified, and commodified, and where even the most private longing becomes entangled in the machinery of surveillance.