a matter of relation is a work for one performer and single-channel feedback system with processing that is part of a broader series of works using live feedback to engage queer of color sensibilities of time. In these works, (audio) feedback loops emerge as interesting parallels to the queer theoretical writings of Sara Ahmed, Mark Rifkin, and José Esteban Muñoz who complicate normalized sensibilities of duration, experience, and space in time. For these authors, they propose other ways of conceiving and being-in-time that are distinct from the logics of “straight time”, or the chrononormative sequencing of time that is widely understood as clock-time. In this and other adjacent works, I draw on the feedback loop in an attempt to express how time can ultimately be collapsed, reconfigured, and expanded through ideas of multiplicities, durations, and suspensions. While a feedback signal can be considered an infinite stretching of an impulse, where a temporal referent is sustained through its stabilized recurrence, it is felt in the present with anticipation for a future.
Interrupted in part by frequent changes in distance between the speaker and amplifier, the ongoing feedback signal is punctuated by hand gestures and movements that alter the air cavity between the input-output relation. As these physical/spatial changes happen, the temporal shape of what is audible is also immediately impacted, tethering space and time through the choreography of actions. A meditation for queers of color, feedback becomes a metaphor that articulates our orientations as it registers our proximities. It reveals itself in the space between the input and output and overwhelms us with a trace of what has always existed. Here, we are made present in the recognition of our past and in the insistence of our continuation - the ongoing loop where the past is amplified until its not, where the future is held under the conditions of space, and where the present is contingent on the then and there. For feedback that was previously always avoided, hushed, and excluded from audio systems, we envision its presence as a reminder to sustain our our bodies and ourselves. Though noisy in its recurrence, this feedback offers us a moment of refuge, a moment of forever, a moment of always.