No Internal Thing
In a playful bid to think about thought, No Internal Thing is a feverish collision of moving image, sound and voice, that performs what is known as ‘inner speech’. It’s a polyphonic headscape, a mental score, a response to thinking as a state of ventriloquy – where what is most ‘inner’ is actually outer: social and impersonal. Blending speech, sound effects and musical fragments, the audio is populated by disparate parts that chatter and clash and chase after narrative. What keeps them afloat is what threatens to capsize them: cultural myths, accusations, quotes, wisecracks, song lyrics, moral injunctions, uninvited memories, and the pervasive detritus of advertising.
Commissioned by TACO! in 2024, No Internal Thing was developed for the context of Blurt, a platform for sonic experiments in text, with a live audience and broadcast. The first iteration combined live and pre-recorded voice, and was performed from atop a lifeguard’s chair at the back of the gallery, with audience seating loosely arranged in two cerebral hemispheres. Projected onto the opposite wall was an ocean churning in red and pink, filmed from above and below the water, with occasional snatches of an indistinct body submerged among the debris.