Using only the laptop camera within the Zoom meeting platform, I accessed places previously unexplored in my practice. I got up close. The performance featured my mouth encasing the laptop lens, wooden depressor pushed to tongue, a pin light searching the frame of my wide-open mouth. Saying “ahhh-ahhh” bares deep inside the cavity of mouth and throat. A messy test of self-diagnosis, the performance exposes the site of anxiety, the source of this long isolation.

Reconsidering the intersection between the live and the mediated, performance and its document, “Say Ahhh” as a live performance for video tills the lineage of Peggy Phelan’s purist ontology of performance toward Philip Auslander’s redefinition of liveness, and further references Laura Marks’s collapsing of the visual and the haptic. This is an (un)practice(d)-based and digital-lite inquiry derived by means of a performer’s knowledge of spatial and embodied experience, and certainly references both Annie Sprinkle’s 1990 live performance “Public Cervix Announcement” as well as VALIE EXPORT’s 2007 video work “The voice as performance, act and body.”