UC San Diego

How to Survive a 100-Hour Workweek, Vivarium, and Subsong, with accompanying essays, investigate multiple, polyvalent, cumulative ways to engrave multimedia works with labor, touch, and affect. I frame a discussion of my three works through alliances with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Katrine Dirkinck-Holmfeld, and Brian Massumi. Sedgwick configures tactile materials in terms of "texture" and "texxture," where two x's signify a material that is dense with freely offered information about how, substantively and historically, it came into being. Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld applies Sedgwick's tex[x]tures to the question of digital data, a highly manipulatable medium that doesn't necessarily embed specific histories, to show its expressive, affective potentials. Brian Massumi, in “Autonomy of Affect,” discusses how contexts become affective in resonance with bodies. Working with these allies, my musical explorations of texture, tactility and affect range from corporate affective discipline via wellness industry media in late capitalism, to an exploration of the affect of abjection through a touch-guided dance with pomegranates, to the musical potentials of touch and labor performed in the digital production studio.