Created over the last year The Opera is a digital video work which unites footage drawn from global media channels with digital avatars produced by the United State's military. In the resulting work a chorus of animated soldiers sing their threats and statements to similarly animated civilians. Phrases such as “Do not move or the American solider will kill you” or “We are not here to harm anyone” are sung in Chinese, Dari, Farsi, French, Korean, Pashto, Russian, Spanish and Urdu. Using melodic structures drawn from the spoken texts Crowe and Rawlinson composed a musical score as the framework for an ‘operatic’ narrative that relays a story of a man who gets arrested and interrogated by an occupying military force. The impact of the work is all the more powerful when we grasp that the narrative being presented here is the script for a fantasy of world domination. In the artist's own words "Stumbling across these digital military phrasebooks was an experience somehow akin to walking round a German armaments factory in 1936....for all its semantic subtleties it really means only one thing. These people are preparing for war." Curated by Jule Reuter.