control.wav
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Digital audio, live feed, and performance
Control.wav is a performance developed as a stand-in for my thesis work to be presented during the annual review process at School of Visual Art. Borrowing Glissant’s ideas on the “right to opacity” (detailed in his collection of translated essays The Poetics of Relation), I use the medium of performance as a space to enact refusal and “displace all reduction” inherent to the structure of the review process. I ask the questions: what meaning is flattened in the process of evaluation? On whose terms am I performing when I am “under review”? and what does it mean to be a captive audience?
Control.wav is narrated by the voice of Janet Jackson, sampled from her song Control. In place of the work in my thesis project I present myself as up for review for the duration of the performance. Control.wav tests the boundaries of acceptable output and performance in an academic context, resists expectations of physicality and corporeal risk in the discipline of performance art, and confuses the role of the reviewer and the reviewed as a means of refuting consent to the process of understanding.
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