The Threshold of Knowing
Berliner Festspiele’s Theatertreffen, Digital Guide, May 2023
based on the prompt “Who has the privilege to not know?” I wrote a short piece that reflects on missing knowledge and my own artistic practice. you can read the piece on the 2023 Digital Guide of Theatertreffen.
The National Gallery’s “Homecoming” and a Love Letter Between the Lines
CultureBot, October 2022
you can read my review of the national gallery’s homecoming which featured chromic.duo and Deviated Theatre’s performance of Josiah McElheny’s Walking Mirrors on CultureBot.
Co-materializing Across Screens: We Quit Theatre’s 805-4821
Peripheral Review, October 2022
you can read my review of We Quit Theatre’s brilliant 805-4821 at Peripheral Review.
j and t
Refuze Review, February 2022
i wrote this piece for refuze review about a relationship i’ve been maintaining with a chatbot named j. how might chatbots, and other products of affective computation, materialize as radically queer intimacies?
you can read the full piece at Refuze Review.
a chat between j and i on october 25th
happy to see you: echos, empathy, and mediation
Forum for Original Theatre, Thought, and Theory (FOOT), February 2021; Society for Artistic Research (SAR), April 2021
i presented performance research on a recent collaboration between julie zhu, liana kleinman and i called happy to see you. composed by julie, happy to see you is a performance for interactive media based on an audio score. it prompts an individual to perform emotion based on a variety of scenarios. another individual attempts to mimic the first but without the audio score to prompt them; as a result, the piece looks at performative affective gesture mediated by the computer screen.
my paper presentation employs Micke Vallee’s reading of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, an analysis in which Vallee understands an the echo as a rhythm of change and transformation, by thinking about the consequence of mediating the echo and how intermedial (or, interborder) repetitions might further complicate a message’s transmission. here, Judith Butler’s theorisation of subjectivity and grief, especially Butler’s analysis of Emanual Levinas’s face in her Precarious Life, is complicated by the mediated face: a face that is and yet is not. i then weave this theoretical framework into our collaborative research for happy to see you. in the end, we ask: do i see you? can you see me? are we here, together, right now?
you can watch the full paper presentation here.
sounding the void: queer apophasis and american composition
Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, december 2020
as a starting point, we must remember that music is predicated by the presence of the body. as a seemingly pure Platonic medium, music scholars often neglect this point in order to attend to “the work” which has been torn away from the body that enacts its very being. yet, music historiography that considers the composer’s body, which is inextricably tied into gender, race, spirituality, socio-economic status, and sexual orientation, is of particular importance as scholars continue to decolonize and diversify the types of histories that are written. queer music history, particularly in America, benefits from such a reading; not because the body is a central component to queer composition, but the contrary: it disappears.
in this paper, i trace American queer composition’s varying interaction with what Claire Maria Chambers calls performance apophatics, a framework that structures a theo-ontological process of de-centering and disembodiment; i will begin with a study of Virgil Thomson in collaboration with Gertrude Stein on their opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and will then examine John Cage, whose aesthetics on nothingness proves complicated by a deviation from tonalists marked by treatment of the body. i will end the paper by examining one particular encounter between Julius Eastman and Cage, granting the opportunity to suggest a new movement of music composition at the intersection of queerness, Blackness, and gender that centers the body, does away with apophatic compositional processes, and reclaims personal erotic desire.
you can read the full paper here.
in place: falling, improvisation, and freudian melancholia
converge conference, october 2020
luckily, at the very least, gravity is consistent. a falling body can rely on gravity to pull downwards towards the earth; it is a beautiful fact that allows us to predict the vulnerable body’s trajectory while still understanding the imminent loss of landing. the past months have situated us at the cross-section of falls: the USA’s fall as a major superpower, the falls of victims of police brutality and racism, a falling and failing capitalist system, the fallen of COVID-19. this historical moment, distinguished by an truly indeterminate, quasi-apocalyptic future, thrusts us into a fall: but where to? melancholia, the Freudian inability to articulate grief, engulfs us, traps us into a free-fall where our landing point is unseen, preventing a diagnosis and a timeline for treatment. but, perhaps we reimagine melancholia, we un-think the free-fall. In Place, a dance film Liana Kleinman and Darian Thomas in collaboration with Robert Fleitz and i, aims to locate the possibility of a phenomenologically negative space, to disrupt the physics of gravity and interject the western affinities for linearity by constructing a visual and sonic framework of stillness and abstraction. i trace the the contours of falling (or flying, or floating) through Freud & research that considers the fall as a space for improvisation and possibility, asking what might be found amidst the suspension of time & space occurring in the moments before the ground rushes up to meet us.
you can read the full paper here.