How's Your Car @Stanford University
[2021, Stanford University Department of Theater and Performance Studies, 57’20 audio-visual piece, b/w.]
[…] in a world in which the essential depends on the gratuitous, gimmicks are sometimes necessary to get out of other gimmicks. -Sianne Ngai
Unscripted and recorded in one one-take alone within the confines of my car, the vocal track for the audio-visual piece How’s Your Car draws upon the contemporaneous COVID-19 pandemic and threats to democracy around the turn of the 2021 new year. The piece threads documentary recordings within its soundscape of driving. Through an examination of the question “how’s your car?” — which ruminates on scholarship by thinkers such as J. L. Austin, Friedrich Nietzsche, to Jane Bennett and Andrew Sofer — the piece meditates on issues of repair within the neoliberal state of late capitalism. The piece was supported by Stanford University’s TAPS Department and advised by Peggy Phelan and Michael Rau. Image design by: TAPS Marketing (Brendon Martin and Stefanie Midori Okuda).
