Performance
Ruler of My Heart, 2023.
Fowlentines Cabaret at the Deep End Studios, Queen Memorial Building, Philadelphia, PA. Live Performance featuring copper wire, magnets, mp3 player, cotton, polyester.
During the performance, I created a quiet speaker by wrapping copper wire around a long tube made from fabric and polyester and neodymium magnets. Then I wrapped the copper-clad fabric tube around my body. The copper connected to an mp3 player programmed to play Irma Thomas’s 1962 Ruler of My Heart on loop, allowing the whole structure to function as a speaker. Audience members had to get very close to me to hear the music being projected from my body.
I developed the performance after making a series of speakers with copper tape and paper, inspired by the intimacy that a low volume sound necessitates. I also became obsessed with the spiral and coil forms that speakers have. I wanted my body to be physically entangled in the form and used the performance to realize a one-to-one size ratio between my body and the speaker. This one-to-one ratio was repeated in the modesty of the speaker’s volume: only one person could be close enough to me to hear the song.