Assertions

Personal Significance, Background, and the Copyrights:

One ambition for this project is to use the state as a type of art medium by way of the copyright process. To achieve this, I am hosting a series of small gatherings in my home and recording audio from casual conversations with my guests. At the end of each gathering, I submit the recording to the U.S Copyright office as a recorded work and script, to which all guests are listed as co-authors. Once I receive the printed copyright license, I use it to create a secondary mixed medium work. My technique for this process involves cutting each document into strips which I weave and collaged into larger compositions made from dry media like charcoal and soft pastel. In this way, I’m thinking of copyright law and the larger legal apparatus as a type of camera which captures a portrait of our gathering at a very specific and limited resolution.

My fascination with administrative law and my intent to create art through it is born of my own family history. My grandfather, Garvey Laurent, started his career in Haitian government before expatriating to the U.S. during the rise of the Duvalier regime. He went on to become a diplomat for the United Nations (https://dam.media.un.org/archive/-2AM9LO3LG9_V.html), working as an agricultural economist on missions to Congo, Chad and Ghana. He returned to Haiti after the collapse of Duvalier’s family rule and participated in a conference of officials tasked with drafting a new Haitian constitution. To his frustration and perpetual heartbreak, these efforts failed. Growing up, I developed a sense for the fragility of social contract, as well as the miraculous amount of coordination and suspension of disbelief it requires to flourish. Indeed my grandfather experienced its shortcomings and the cruelties of its collapse in ways I wish felt more remote. At the same time, I know how aspirationally my grandfather worked to see something stable, functional, and indeed beautiful emerge from the promise of government for the people. These tensions, as well as a fascination with the uncanny procedural aesthetics of the administrative process, drive my curiosity in creating Assertions.

Notes on form and narrative:

Assertions is a development of a piece I first piloted in 2024 titled “Five Hegemonies”, in which Time, Tone, Body, Interdependence, and Language were personified as entities to be reckoned with through a series of performed metaphors. This work follows the same convention while exploring ways to increase its dynamism and artistic impact. When any text- spoken, written, or sung, appears in the piece, we are dealing with Language the character. The same is true of each of the Hegemons. Assertions goes on to introduce the protagonist Experience, which I’m interpreting as that of the performers, myself, and the audience. This convention opens a lane to explore relationships between these phenomena as a dramatic matter, with attention toward the motivations that drive their exchanges. Below is an example of how this concept might operate in relation to a conflict between Language and Experience:

—— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——

Voice 1:

Language wraps experience in a semi permeable membrane, allowing for transfer and storage. The permeability of the membrane determines how the experience may be applied across time. The membrane insulates the experience from the airflow of imagination, reducing reactivity between the packaged experience and that of its observer. Stripped of myth potential, experience may serve as a rule- its linguistic packaging having prepared it for future instrumentalization. Such storage of experience is necessary for its codification into determinant systems. Impermeability of the linguistic membrane renders its contents unrecognizable as “experience” at all, leaving it transmissible only as information.

(synthesizer sounds descending notes per syllable of the word “question”)

Voice 2: Question

Voice 1: How has the language above interacted with the content of its assertions?

( 8 beats before saxophone sounds descending notes per syllable of the word “question”)

Voice 2: Question

Voice 1: If the statement above is to be accepted, what is experience?

(8 beats)

Voice 1: The appellant has opted to respond to the second question first.

Voice 2: The appellant can do no wrong.

Voice 1: A kaleidoscope of free association opens before the appellant’s lips.

Voice 2: The appellant refuses the bait.

Voice 1: The appellant is suspended above a feedback loop of will and compulsion.

Voice 2: A low pressure system is established.

Voice 1: A whistle sounds in the distance.

Voice 2: The train of thought is leaving the station.

—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——

Assertions is an exploration of Experience as a relational counterpart to the solipsism of consciousness- which seems to have obsessed the popular imagination of late. In this, Assertions aims to break a spell. It is my attempt to center the miraculous in the universal, and to address matters of spiritual and societal import with both seriousness and levity.