watchpeopledie.tv

The thesis piece is a performance called watchpeopledie.tv performed four times at the Anderson Gallery in the Hidden Galleries. There are two rooms in the gallery. The first room is where the audience enters. There is a line on the floor marking that the audience is not to move further into the first room or into the second room. The audio consists of verbatim comments sourced from videos of violence against trans people from the website watchpeopledie.tv, a website in which users post real videos of shootings, suicides, car accidents, etc. The main text, which is my thesis writing below, also called watchpeopledie.tv, is an interpretation of these comments. It was included in the space during the performance as a booklet for the audience to read. The performance consists of me sitting naked on a stool, restricting all movement in order to remain completely still, yet trying to get up and leave the frame at the same time. When I do move my presence is disturbed by the walls separating the two rooms, the lines created by physical space/time. The performance lasts 3 hours. The thesis writing is a performance text documenting and further enacting the thesis performance. It is a text made from performing an erasure poem on the text of the transphobic comments and then commenting on the erased words. It is accompanied by the Introduction, a trimmed transcript of an audio recording in which I describe how I came to make the thesis.