*the viewer is encouraged to watch with subtitles/closed captions

 

Singapore’s national history is made up of “man begot man begot man” genealogies. We’ve already Found so many fathers and are constantly in search for more; it’s terribly boring. What’s interesting, however, is the fact that built into my computer is a library of various international voices, ranging from “Daniel” (UK English), to Mei Jia (Chinese), to Damayanti (Indonesian). Upon discovering these voices, I felt inspired to give new life to a poem I had written, entitled SG500, about our country’s obsessive control over leadership genealogies from Sir Stamford Raffles and disruptions or “noise” in the historical movement from the colonial to the postcolonial. Distributing SG500’s lines across the different voices performs the hybridity inherent in a single postcolonial person’s psyche, showing sonically the influences of different traditions and rendering conflicting beliefs within oneself more apparent. All the while, I as the performer am eating/speaking these voices from the common basis of my body and moving as I do so; the effect is perhaps a kind of defamiliarisation—that my natural voice is insecurely grounded in my body, just one part of my own vocal “library” in the style of Laurie Anderson.

 

I see this video performance as a productive and corporealised variation of the original poem (which lives on a digital page in my writing blog), which puts the ghost of performing in written text in contact with the ghosts of my computer and the ghosts of our historical past.

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