Liveness can take on many forms. This fact has never been so prominent than during a global pandemic when performers of all sorts have been forced to find new ways to approach their art. As performance artists were forced to leave galleries and stages and clubs, taking to new platforms to distribute their work, it has become easy to understand things like Twitch streaming or going live on Instagram as a kind of performance. But it shouldn’t take something so severe to expand our understanding of liveness. What about the performances we encounter everyday–those that aren’t necessarily spectacular or obvious? What defines performance after all? Is performance marked by its ephemerality? By its activeness? By the way audiences engage?

Driven by these questions, I applied for a curatorial residency with Hot Wheelz Festival, a virtual live arts platform founded by Jill Perez and Lauren Steinberg during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic made us realize that we weren’t meeting new people and forming new collaborative relationships like we used to,” Perez and Steinberg explain their motivation for starting the festival, which, “highlights new work and collaboration.” As the festival enters its second season, Perez and Steinberg have teamed up with curators Afriti Bankwalla (yours truly), Hot Kitchen Collective, and !MMM to bring you three exciting weeks of programming on their webpage.

Hot Wheelz is very much a product of the pandemic.  However, as we return to in-person events, the need for differing presentations of live arts remains. As Perez and Steinberg aptly note, “We need to acknowledge that a lot of local art institutions that have moved to in-person experiences have not done the work to make themselves accessible, due to gatekeeping plus physical and financial barriers, and that even in a post-pandemic world those systemic issues will remain.” 

Hot Wheelz professes that, “live work hinges on the present experience of the audience,” which is intentionally vague and complicated. Thus, I designed In My Room, an interactive exhibition intended to bring light to the performances we experience and play out every day. Modeled after point and click gaming sites of the early 2000s (think Neopets), In My Room quite literally allows audiences to explore the performances that might be hidden in our very bedrooms. The webspace of the gallery is converted into an explorable bedroom, welcoming audiences into an intimate environment.

There are three artworks displayed in the exhibit created by artists from the queer community I surround myself with: chemtrails by aza, an art film that explores the intangibility of capturing the present moment through piecing together selfies and screen recordings from the artist’s iPad; Scratching the Surface Membrane by Jackie Margolis, a two-part zine series that tracks the artists evolving relationship to identity over time; and Some Sludge by ted bourget, a four-part video game that blurs fantasy and reality in order to question how places can shape our selves. As audiences move through the exhibit, they are asked to think about how each of the objects in the room provokes or embodies performance. How is the ritual of reading a book–picking it up, reading the back cover, flipping the pages–a performance? What about the activeness of playing a game? Who are we posing for when we pause to take a selfie in our bathroom mirror? 

In My Room runs July 5 to 9 at Hotwheelzfestival.com/current-residency. New content will be added throughout the week so keep returning to the page for the full experience. Creator of Some Sludge ted bourget and I will also be live streaming a run through of the game on July 8 at 8 p.m. Watch at https://www.twitch.tv/hotwheelzfestival

Feature image from chemtrails by aza, follow them on Instagram at @mybloodyeye

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