video, performance
Chapter 31 stills
Chapter 31 stills
Chapter 31
2007-2008
video
5 minutes 20 seconds
“Chapter 31” is a performance based video in which I re-enact sections from three speeches found in the final chapter of A Documentary History of the United States, an anthology of historic documents from U.S. history. “America at the Millennium” (chapter 31) contains the texts of two addresses given by George W. Bush after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks as well as the farewell address delivered by Rudolph Giuliani in December 2001.
The piece is part remix, part mash-up. Just as a mash-up artist pulls apart a song looking for samples to re-use, I broke down the speeches sentence by sentence selecting and setting aside what struck me as usable excerpts. I then fused the remaining fragments and constructed a “fourth speech”.
