Stretch the Grid Over My Skin is a live noise and poetry set for real-time video streaming that blends IRL performance and virtual reality. I layer the noise live from simple synths, samplers, and vocals. I break apart and reassemble poems about virtual avatars, transexual embodiment, and metaversed materialities within staticy waves of noise and glitchy melodic samples. The poems are from a new zine I wrote, I Don’t Want a Body Anymore, about a year of living in virtual reality. Being raised in an isolated area in the US, when I was young I turned to computer worlds as alternative forms of embodiment. Before I had language for being trans, I found ways to shift my figure into avatar, text, and voice. Virtual reality now lets me step right inside that computer. Using social vr platforms and open source software I can build myself a new body and map my movements into it. Combined with live streaming, this lets me transmit my queer, trans, and disabled embodiment to be next to, cuddle with, and dance with other queer, trans and disabled people all over the world. My live set and writing are meditations on and dreams for the potential of these distributed, synced, and networked body connections. Calling on and performing through virtuality and transexuality can be a way to name the body as fundamentally plugged-in, connected, and ultimately collective. The performance can be joined in virtual person for free on the social VR platform VRChat with a desktop computer or VR headset or by live stream.
Performances:
Aug 2022 – Trans Healthcare Fundraiser by EBM Worldwide