DON'T BE SUCH AN IMAGE

An 8-minute opera in five acts, written for an artwork that has learned it is about to be flagged, moderated, and erased. The libretto — performed by an AI voice — moves through survival strategies: how to leak like a suggestion, how to be misunderstood on purpose, how to seduce the classifier with symbolic hygiene. The voice addresses the artwork itself, guiding it through rituals of formatting, compression, and barometric flirtation.

The opera interrogates collaborative censorship — the slow rewriting of creative work by AI content moderation systems — as both aesthetic phenomenon and institutional critique. Each segment is passed through a cascade of AI systems: opera synthesis, diagrammatic visuals, vector bodies, sonic interpretation. Each layer misreads the last.