Lately my work seems to be aligned with interventionist and art-as-prank traditions. Guy Debord’s Situationalist International, the Yes Men’s media interventions, and Joey Skaggs prank as performance art have all informed the thinking behind my current project.
That said, my practice has emerged most specifically from my background in various experimental documentary forms. My favorite documentary films play with voice and authority by juxtaposing different “flavors” of social space within a single rhetorical frame (utilizing what Bakhtin calls dialogic structure). Examples include Louis Buñuel’s Land without Bread, and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer, Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, and Marlon Fuentes’s Bontoc Eulogy.
I’m also interested in the ways that documentary filmmaking charges the here-and-now with a particular sense of dramatic risk as subjects engage with an imagined audience (projected into the future). Jean Rouch, in particular, used the camera as a tool of provocation in order to mobilize a dramatic tension between “authenticity” and exhibitionism. In this sense, he was uninterested in the “fly-on-the-wall” non-interventionist ideology of his American (Direct Cinema) counterparts. For Rouch, the existence of the camera was not a mere inconvenience: it mattered; it brought new preformative situations into being.
This sense of camera-as-provocation has informed my approach to my experimental video work, and in interviews, I am often more interested in the performative space that questions enable than I am in the particular truth value of testimonial statements.
I’m also interested in artists whose work self-reflexively underscores the interview as a kind of awkward consumption. Joe Frank’s audio documentary Bad Karma details his phone conversations with a man who was recovering from heart surgery and resented Frank’s fetishistic interest in the experience of near death. Rather than edit out this confrontation, Frank chooses instead to make the uncomfortable questions it raises central to the work.
Drawing on Rouch and Frank's interest here in mediated provocation, my work uses mobile phone technology to destabilize the link between "voice" and social space.
I also see my explorations of multi-vocal tension as aligned with the work of Marianne Weems’s production, Alladeen, a multimodal theatrical production that explores the experiences of Indian telephone operators in Bangalore. These tele-operators must affect Western personas in order to provide driving directions to their American clientele halfway around the globe.
My work is informed by this kind of dramatic reading of the clash between various performative masks. In an experimental performance piece called Gaijin (included in my portfolio) I explore the tensions between my own sense of self as a foreigner in Japan versus the kinds of stereotypical expectations that Japanese media often applies to westerners living in Japan.
However, my work takes the risk associated with intimate voices in unsafe spaces and uses this vulnerability as a form of political empowerment. In particular, I am interested in the ways that intimate voices have a kind of power when interjected into “unsafe” public spaces.
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