May 26, 2021
We were delighted to perform at WGXC’s 10th Anniversary Drive-in Event alongside Stephin Merritt (Magnetic Fields), Anna Friz, Brian DeWan, and others. The text is a memoir excerpt from my days in 80s queer Dallas. See below for full details about this rather complicated and altogether psychebending collaboration with the inimitable JEN KUTLER. The original text for this piece was published recently by Gulf Coast Journal and can be read here. And there is lots more about the event itself on the Wave Farm WGXC website here.
Southern Comfort: Ten Shots, Jen Kutler and Quintan Ana Wikswo
Southern Comfort: Ten Shots is a live audio-visual performance premiere based on the collaborative radio sound piece by Jen Kutler and Quintan Ana Wikswo. Revisioning the 1980s underground culture of alt-video and liminal queerness in the Mexican borderlands, this work forms a survivalist collision of analogue and digital, AIDS and Covid, and the shadowlands of bio-emotive, empathic response to speaking the unspoken, Southern Comfort modifies cultural detritus of power, gender, race, queerness, and intimacy to yield a ferocity of possibility in the junkyards of America.
Wikswo’s texts, videos, and voice performance Southern Comfort (supported by Creative Capital, Yaddo, and published in Gulf Coast) invokes her own rich, evolving and intergenerational legacy of obscured drag, ballroom, trans-, mixed-race, and queer US/Mexico border experience in its complexity of solidarity and joy in the onslaught of bigotry, violence, hate crimes, and vigilante death squads. Kutler’s hand-engineered biological sensor devices are worn on her body and document into custom sonification software her physiological responses to the spoken narrative, generating sounds and synthetic voices that draw from granular synthesis, sine waves, cassette tape loops and stringed instruments. The physiological sensor data also manipulates Wikswo’s archival video content through an RGB color ‘wobbulator’ (the first of its kind) which is derived from Nam Jun Paik’s black and white Raster Manipulation Unit from the 1960s. This will be the first public performance with this device, consisting of a vintage RGB projector with nine additional deflection coils which collectively handle over 1,000 watts of audio range signal translating it to raster manipulations of individual colors
In celebration of WGXC’s ten year history, Southern Comfort is a work of ten texts, ten videos, and ten variated sensor response, with ten shots of Southern Comfort poured out in recognition of the lives of queer BIPOC killed by a nation’s psychopathic predation of its artistic and cultural visionaries. These “shots” also honor Wave Farm’s legendary heritage within the vanguard of broadcasting, amplifying, activating, and advocating for what we absolutely must continue to hear within ourselves and our communities: the transmissions of self-expression that bring the fringe to focus.