My creative work encompasses hypertext and performance, deconstructing speech and writing by placing it in multimedia, coded ecosystems.
What I've Done is equal parts a satirical surrealist free-jazz meta-monologue, an existential crisis, and a bit of good fun. The musicians play from doodles scrawled around the written text, encouraging them to negotiate a semantic, cartoony chaos to turn the doodles into sound. The piece folds in on itself in multiple levels: the speaker's internal, bottled-up overflowing pressure-cooker of meaning, then the competition between the speaker as bandleader and the band, and finally the tension between speaker and audience. Meanwhile, there's a fourth tension of me, who is writing this program note, and me, who was filmed in the video and wrote the piece as well as performing it. Oh, what have I done.
Sam Blieden produced & directed the video, with support from Henry Nelson & Will Curry. The band is the Self-Prescribing Doctors Union, comprised of Henry Nelson (guitar), Will Curry (saxophone), Owen Frankel (bass), and Jeremy McCabe (drums). Truly, this piece is what all of them have done to bring this idea to fruition.