Disruptive Currents
An interactive installation exploring structural violence, knowledge, fear, power, and the politics of difference through embodied experience
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Foundation
Structural Violence & Bodies
AoV's "Near Life"
"Near life" describes trans/queer existence as a state of (non)subjectivity under racialized and gendered violence, where suffering bodies are tethered to ontological erasure.
Fanon's "Sociogeny"
Fanon's critique of colonialism's psychic and material violence, where the colonized body internalizes dehumanization through historical power relations.
Marx's "Revolutionary Atmosphere"
Marx's metaphor for the collective rage under capitalism, "weighing like a nightmare on the living," where social relations become instruments of suffering.
Historic speech from the 1973 Gay Pride Rally in NYC
Floating Debris
Curricular Knowledge
Britzman's "Inconsolable Education"
Education that refuses resolution, embracing uncertainty and repressed histories (e.g., HIV/AIDS, colonialism).
Felman's "Knowledge Not in Mastery"
Knowledge that destabilizes authority, as in Shoshana Felman's work on literature's unruly truths.
Tension Wires
Fear, Risk & Danger
Leonardo & Porter's "Pedagogy of Fear"
Critique of "safe spaces" that protect whiteness; argues for productive anxiety and danger as necessary for anti-racist dialogue that challenges social norms.
AoV's "Overkill"
Excessive violence beyond biological death (e.g., mutilation of trans/queer bodies) to erase ontological possibility, where fear becomes a political tool for maintaining difference.
Baldwin's "Trauma of Education"
Baldwin's warning that education reproduces systemic cruelty unless it confronts its own complicities with power structures that generate collective anxiety.
Affective Atmosphere
Feelings, Time & Relations
Anderson's "Meteoric Turbulence"
Ben Anderson's idea of atmospheres as indeterminate, dynamic forces shaped by bodies and environments, where collective feelings circulate through historical time.
Böhme's "Quasi-Objective Feelings"
Gernot Böhme's concept of atmospheres as neither subjective nor objective but existing in the relations between bodies and spaces, where pain becomes a shared experience.
Othering & Difference
Politics of Subject/Object
Butler's "Frames of Recognition"
Judith Butler's analysis of how certain bodies become "ungrievable" through social norms that determine which subjects are recognized as fully human and which are rendered as objects.
Spivak's "Strategic Essentialism"
Gayatri Spivak's concept of temporarily accepting essentialist categories to achieve political goals, while recognizing the danger of stereotypes that reduce complex identities to singular signs.
Ahmed's "Strange Encounters"
Sara Ahmed's exploration of how difference is produced through encounters between bodies, where the "other" is recognized through fear and anxiety that maintains social boundaries.
Central Axis
Generative Disruption
Greene's "Imagination as Method"
Maxine Greene's argument that art and imagination are tools to re-envision oppressive systems.
AoV's "Ungovernability"
Refusal of state recognition, as seen in Miss Major's rejection of legal gender categories.
Interactions & Synthesis
This model refuses flatness by making each layer interdependent—the storm cannot be navigated without engaging all elements.
Systemic Violence ↔ Affective Turbulence
Stepping on the cracked foundation destabilizes the fog, forcing viewers to confront Rashawn Brazell's story.
Risk ↔ Repair
Mending snapped wires (e.g., discussing police brutality) injects Tony Kushner's dialogues into the mist.
Inconsolable Knowledge ↔ Atmosphere
Engaging Lucy's daffodil nightmare thins the fog, revealing Britzman's "elbow-room for concern."
Subject ↔ Object Relations
Confronting the politics of othering reveals how fear and social norms construct difference through the designation of certain bodies as objects rather than subjects.