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Fragment (live performance)

(2004)

Fragment is a spoken word and live-video piece in which video and audio re-mixing accompanies live performance.

Statement:

Fragment is a mix of live-video and prose.   The prose is spoken as one long sentence that enacts the shattering of a single modernist ideal into the fragmented inevitability of the postmodern re-mix.   The urge for creation causes a bubbling-to-the-surface of artistic manifestation that becomes the medium for the intentions and thoughts of the artist.   However, the very act of manifestation subjects the work to being torn apart, lifted, sampled, re-mixed, re-purposed, co-opted, and re-contextualized by contemporary culture.   Although Fragment tries to hold itself together structurally by being uttered as one long sentence, not allowing for a pause or a break in the thought string, the accompanying video projection immediately breaks it into smaller and smaller pieces even at the moment of initial conception and manifestation.   Metaphorically speaking, it is as if a plant or vegetable growing in the ground were to sprout itself directly into a food processor.   In this same way, created works are subject to becoming sliced and diced even at the moment of their conception.  

In a battle between modernist and postmodernist ideology, Fragment creates tension between its audio and visual components, as well as its live and projected imagery.   Taken as a whole, Fragment becomes a celebration of its own destruction as it can also be seen as a continuous act of reconstruction.   It is proposed that fragments have the advantage of out-living the whole.