&NOW 2018

This performance will occur twice during the session time, once at the beginning and again at 3:15 pm.

Inside my gorge combines the real-time erection and arrangement of augmented reality-based textual architectures with immersive, 3d virtual environments to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a poetics of queer embodiment in mixed reality. Drawing upon the word gorge to suggest a valley, an act of overindulgence, and a throat, the work explores gaps and excesses in language and the conflation of text, body and landscape. In the 1970’s, American self-taught artist Loy Bowlin designated himself "the original rhinestone cowboy." Adopting the persona from Glen Campbell’s hit song Rhinestone Cowboy, he intricately bedazzled his house, car, clothing, and dentures, creating a ubiquitous excess to compensate for a profound loneliness. Using Bowlin’s original unoriginality as a starting point, the performance appropriates sites of vernacular language and architecture in which all gaps are gorged. Bowlin's rhinestone habitat - rendered as a luminous environment derived from 3d scans - is placed in relation to auction chanting where the cumulative repetition of numbers and "filler words" becomes a fluidly stuttering drone. Other sources at play include Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s collaborative The Sonnet of the Hole in the Ass and Pierre Guyotat’s 1975 novel, Prostitution. Composed in an invented mixed language dialect, Guyotat's summoning of sex acts in a gay male brothel is less narrative than linguistic secretion, a distinctive outpouring of self-same written material and displaced punctuation comprising an extravagant verbivisivoco ambience. Using solicitous flows of embodied language to create dazzling environments, Inside My Gorge enacts cuts and disappearing acts between the body, language and space.