6-channel audio installation with curtains, copper piping, rugs, lighting, and speakers. Speaker sculptures: cardboard, acoustically transparent cloth, and paint. Audio: 54 minutes looped. Installation view IAC, Malmo, Sweden. 2018

ReCast LIVE ON-AIR takes the shape of a live studio discussion that is broadcast from a fictive radio station in which people from across more than 200 years have come together to share their intimate experiences and perspectives on gender and non-monogamy. This group of specters and futuristics hash out the separation of love from pleasure, and debate the liberatory possibilities of various forms of caring such as free love, polyamory, and complex marriage. They also express future forms such as the notion I call “expanded affinities” and another I term “compassioned expression”. One radio guest is a nineteenth century free love commune member who appears in the studio to share the continued relevance of their community’s free love practices; another is a twentieth century essentialist feminist who is unable to let go of the gender binary; others speak from a future where neither gendered subjectivities nor singular forms of relationships exist. The voices are inspired by people like queer theorist Paul Preciado, French novelist Anaïs Nin, and Tirzah Miller who was a member of the 19th century non-monogamous group, the Oneida Community.

The audio is installed in such a way that the voice of each ‘radio guest’ plays back through an individual speaker within the main elliptical curtain. Two speakers outside the curtained area play the callers or specters of the station as well as environmental tracks—one of chants from the Women’s March of 1970, the other a bucolic walk through the grasses while humming a hymn. Spectators are able to commune with the disembodied voices in a listening space that evokes both a nineteenth century séance parlor and a futuristic radio station. The voices confer in an ever-present loop on WPPF Radio, and thus creates a type of utopian futurity.

ReCast LIVE ON AIR is produced from a sense of longing to be free from the here and now. The specters from the past, present, and future are summoned to confer and to release us from the immediate constraints of society, law, and culture in order to make way for a utopian future. Sounding like voices from an outer ring of space, the relationship radicals reject the charmed circle and the linearity of the relationship escalator that ascends from dating, to love, to marriage, and then children. The installation works to resist forms of “straight time”.

AUDIO LINK HERE