“An alleged lunatic does their best” is a 24-hour, improvisational, noise-making action. This work, responding not only to the isolation of quarantine but the general malaise of late-capitalism, seeks a sonic sensibility for the development of Mad praxis. Historically, those classified as Mad have lacked a real sense of visibility; hidden away in jails, institutions, sanitariums, psych wards, or their own homes. When we are visible it is usually through fetishized (often hyperbolic and offensive) representations in mass media. Mad bodies must seek a reclamation of our right to appear as political subjects.

This performance takes on the provocation of Fred Moten that “sound gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism has repressed.” Sound draws attention towards itself. It makes apparent the space in which it resonates. It allows a body to transcend the demands of physical embodiment in its search for connection. Sound is a carrier of our history, cultural identity, memory, personality; it is an assertion of our agency.

My frequencies are a mess, desperate for expression. To become timeless, timeless, and untimely. To become tactical, relational. To become promiscuously open, to take all comers. To become as a process, a fundamental state of being, a material resistance, a transgressive destabilizer, a failure, a “polymorphous subjectivity,” an operation rather than a sign, an expression of a system, a system of expression in opposition to binary distinctions. To become the sum total of all possible frequencies, a “raw, inhuman fact,” the most original of sounds, a feedback loop, the reverse of power. To become nothing, purposeless, a pure affective charge. I make noise. I am noise. I use technology to amplify myself.