Charis Poon gives the textual equivalent of “reaction videos“ to excerpts from Ursula K Le Guin, revealing shifting desires and identities over time in this eight-part series.
Published in conjunction with In Our Own Backyard, AAA's exhibition that explores the creative impulses and forms of gathering within the women’s movements in South Asia from the 1980s onward.
Reaction videos have been derided as shallow, an easy way to generate material without actually coming up with something original. But I see reaction videos in the same family as art and literary criticism. One appeal of both is the person’s response in relation to the prompt—watching how a work inspires or fails to inspire awe, disgust, grief, excitement, pleasure, contemplation, revelation. The react video is an instant take, good criticism is a deliberated assessment; I want to capture both. What would be the textual equivalent of that?
With ARTIST REACTS TO FEMINIST WRITINGS MASHUP TEXT, I respond—eight times, over the course of eight weeks—to the same selection of excerpted writing by Ursula K Le Guin. With each new response, I give another interpretation of the text, which has expanded to include my previous interpretation within it.
Traditional criticism tends to require the critic to form an authoritative judgment, condensing their emotional experience into an intellectual argument. The design of this experiment means the original text will eventually be submerged beneath layers of my “instant” responses, which, if I’m honest to my wavering self, will form an interestingly complex time capsule of my inconsistencies and evolving lines of thinking.
What happens when we treat a text as a spellbook for taking on many forms, our usage reflecting back our shifting identity and desires? Materialising another self in each reaction until the pages are full of these selves—gossiping, jostling, arguing, collaborating with each other.
ARTIST REACTS TO FEMINIST WRITINGS MASHUP TEXT will culminate in an in-person event, in which others will be invited to participate in, and respond to, this project. Who else might we each be? Revealing our collective multiplicity1 points at the already existing possibility for our world to become something different.
Notes
1. “‘Multiplicity’, which replaces the one no less than the multiple, is the true substantive, substance itself. [...] Even the many is a multiplicity; even the one is a multiplicity. [...] Everywhere the differences between multiplicities and the differences within multiplicities replace schematic and crude oppositions. [...] Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is only the variety of multiplicity—in other words, difference.“ Excerpt from Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Banner image courtesy of Charis Poon.
