Selected Research Writing:
Queer Sonic Aesthetics: Resistance and Memoriam in Pauline Oliveros’ Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS (2022)
Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS - In Memorium Peter Oliveros (1994) is a work by Pauline Oliveros for Deep Listening Band and Long String Instrument, written for her half brother, Peter Oliveros, who contracted AIDS in the 1980s in New York. . Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS (1994) was created in two week-long workshops and the score is a mnemonic for the orally transmitted instructions where the players improvise according to the guide. Pauline Oliveros’ Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS is an example of queer speculative musicology as it looked to expand the processing abilities of sexual and gender identity through sound, as well as a queering of the instrumentation and discipline of composition. Motifs like silence, droning, and punctuation in the sound of Pauline Oliveros is an example of sound and improvisational music as a methodological framework that can uniquely register modes of collectivity, desire, trauma, and mourning. By analyzing the sonic aesthetics associated with AIDS activism movements, like ACT Up!, and conducting a semiotic analysis of the graphic score with textual instructions, I will locate queer aesthetics in Pauline Oliveros’ Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS (1994) and In Memory of Peter Oliveros (1994). I analyze the scores as examples of sonic responses that emerged out of the poetic, musical, and performative aesthetics entwined with the AIDS crisis and lesbian feminism by examining music as a process that engages bodies, time, and space.
Queer Citizenship, Surveillance, and Potential Criminality: Marginalized Bodies in the NYPD Surveillance Film Archives (2021)
Throughout the 20th century, the New York City Police Department conducted overt and covert surveillance on groups and individuals identified as potential security threats to the City. This surveillance was transferred from the New York Police Department in 2015 and was released as a part of the Handschu v. Special Services Division case, involving a challenge to NYPD surveillance and investigative practices targeting political groups. The case was settled in 1985, inciting that the Police Department was prohibited from investigating political and religious organizations without “specific information” that the group was linked to a crime that had been committed or was threatened to happen.
I conduct a semantic and aesthetic analysis of the NYPD Surveillance Film Archives’ video content, marketing texts, cultural texts, related exhibitions and events to problematize the intersecting and fortifying authority of archives and policing. I also address the temporal orientation of marginalized people in archives as objects of criminality and potential investigation.
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