WORKS
table
PRESS
PUBLICATIONS
- No Necessary Correspondence exhibition catalog
- Portable Gray, Vol 4, No. 1, Spring 2021: Another Idea exhibition catalog
- Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft: Juniorprofessur und dann noch Habilitation: sinnvoll oder absurd?
- Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft: Formatwechsel. Zur Methodendebatte
- Writing for Sweaty Scales by Liang Luscombe
- Making Plans exhibition catalog essay
before, brother, before:
peripheral visions of an invisible libretto
2016
This performance/exhibition embodies theoretical peripheries and liminal spaces surrounding representation, language, and time. before, brother, before is rooted in the traumatic event of my brother's death, and attempts to trace collective and clandestine solidarities through theories of opacity, intersubjectivity, absence, dematerialization, and quantum mechanics.
The work's central touchstone is a saddle-stitched libretto, drawn in ink replicating journal entries by Aaron Johanson, with untimely responses I drew in my own handwriting. This call and response is surrounded by margins of text drawn from Karen Barad, Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon, Jean-François Lyotard, Catherine Malabou, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Edward Said. The performance architecture includes a birch writing table, task lamp, carpet, a seamless silk membrane enclosure, gravitational wave sounds (produced when two black holes merge), a Paulstretched version of "Naïve Melody" by Talking Heads, and "Wake Up" by Rage Against the Machine.
The libretto was improvisationally performed behind the enclosure by five vocalists (Joe Con-Ui, Von Curtiss, Kyle Johanson, Andre Keichian, and Elizabeth Webb) and four instrumentalists (Ben Finley on upright bass, Tim Tsang on piano, Sarah Reid on trumpet, and Ryan Gaston on sound manipulation).
before, brother, before is a hauntological call and response, conjuring the indeterminate, the speculative, the entangled, and their potential energies for revolutionary becoming.
Bibliography:
Barad, Karen. Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.
Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy.
Malabou, Catherine. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage.
Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.
Puccini, Giacomo. Tosca.
