on earth, we're briefly gorgeous

on earth, we’re briefly gorgeous utilises literary appropriation, manipulated audio, projected visuals, and corporeal performance to immerse the viewer in a subjective queer temporality that subverts heteronormative linearity.

The main crux of the work is the fragmented and personally altered lines of text from Ocean Vuong’s acclaimed poem of the same name, scrolling sporadically across the screen, the textual disjunction mirroring the rupture of normative temporal progression within queer lives. My irregular and scattered recitation of the poem is layered with diegetic sounds - ticking and a heartbeat - evoking bodily rhythms, situating the work within a haptic phenomenology of queer time, rooted in the materiality of queer embodiment. The unpredictable poetic rhythm creates an immersive soundscape expressing the irreducible fluidity of queer subjectivity. Central to the work is my real-time physical and performative response to the visual and auditory components, illuminating their moving form. This creates a dynamic interplay between the audiovisual elements and the corporeality of the queer body. My improvised motions visually re-shape the projected text, foregrounding the overlapping of bodily and linguistic identity within queer existence; movement and language are revealed to be fundamentally interconnected – words shape motions, motions reshape words. Through the fracturing of perspective via the mise-en-abyme (a 2nd camera recording the main camera) the work conveys queer temporality as the suspension of ontological certainty - the viewer is held in an eternal present tense unmoored from the constraints of past or future, where fixed notions of time and space dissolve. Moreover, the work articulates a phenomenology of queer time through its rejection of classical narrative continuity and logic in favour of flows and ruptures inherent within the queer temporal experience, contextualised through my own literary analysis of Vuong’s poem. The formal techniques of fragmentation, layering and discontinuity elicit this affective texture of nonlinear queer temporality existing outside the confines of heteronormative developmental boundaries.

Ultimately, the illumination of my body via projection indelibly transforms it into a poetic surface, underscoring embodied time as the matrix through which queer time, histories, and futures recursively shape the perpetual present. Hence, in the gaps, fissures and silences, the work locates possibility - the timeless becoming of unscripted queer lived experiences unfolding along interconnected axes. By embracing irrationality and chaos, the work affirms the plurality, richness, nonlinearity, and continuity of queer temporalities.

In its truest essence, on earth, we’re briefly gorgeous is an immersive ode to the complexity - and queerness - of time and self.