I work with notions of audienceship and interstitial spaces of engagement. My guiding question remains: what happens when we are in the room together? I find my material from the specificity of these answers and moves outward from there. Typically, I want a non-mediated experience with my audience but social distancing has made that challenging. In this piece, I looked to Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message,” and explored the significance of digital spaces we have recently flooded to.

In this performance, the parameters of the digital platform are bent, creating questions of where the performance was happening, who was doing the creating, and who was performing for whom. The digital hiccups and glitches of this became the material of the work, as well as an invitation to the audience to inform the piece. I also revived older techniques of live video looping in this performance to question the gaze and evoke the past as always remaining in the present. There was a musical soundscape broadcast over the digital call that was ethereal and built with the visual component. The performance started with a line in the Zoom call designated as the stage. Folks were invited to “solo” that view. This view then turns on the video call and explores the faces and backgrounds of the audience members in the call—typically this eventually spurs engagement and interaction from the audience, sometimes building to shared movements, random glitches in trying to hand things off between the Brady Bunch-style grid and other gestures and zooming in on features, lights going off, or examination of artwork hung on walls, etc. This eventually moved into a world of the camera looking at its own view of the call and started to abstract and work with the medium’s own reflection. This becomes a world of visual looping and rainbows of light patterns—shifting and flowing with the swelling of the audio component. The performance is an ongoing exploration of the digital video meeting parameters, particularly in Zoom, and going forward, I am moving toward an added collaborative poetics with further engagement and conceptual building around the interactions.