Party in the Front,
Disaster in the Back
a fucking didactic textile archive
About
Party in the front, disaster in the back is a playable textile installation and performance that stages subject formation under disaster capitalism as both poetic system and game mechanic. A large, double-sided textile functions as a soft interface through which audiences navigate crisis memory, media debris, and algorithmic selfhood.
The work takes 9/11 as a paradigmatic moment of crisis whose ongoing remediation in the War on Terror marks a shift in subjectivity from a “hyperlinked” regime — rhizomatic, lateral, postmodern — to an algorithmically sorted one: feed-based, predictive, surveillant.
The Textile
Presented in the round, one side of the textile resembles a cluttered desktop: sewn folders hold conspiratorial Reddit threads, 9/11 Commission fragments, horror and porn ephemera, and personal reflections, all connected by red thread in a kind of embodied hypertext. This is the hypertextual subject.
The reverse side is structured by empty apliqué “frames” and tall fabric strips that echo both the Twin Towers and the infinite scroll, serving as a projection surface for an endlessly updating visual feed. This is the algorithmic subject.
Performance
Audience members activate the piece by choosing paths through the folders and following specific strands or projections, effectively “playing” a choose-your-own-adventure poem about contemporary crisis subjectivity. In performance, the artists use the textile as a live score for a semi-improvised, video-essay-esque lecture — remixing found text and image into a collectively authored, unstable counter-archive.
“The textile is a floppy gameboard where the media logics through which we constitute our ‘selves’ are autoethnographically archived, and activated through the play of performance.”
Framing
Pre-9/11 subjects appear as X-Files–era Fox Mulder types: broad, schizoanalytic cork-board conspiracists whose hypertextual thinking attempts to map the whole system from the outside. Post-9/11 subjects resemble Keanu Reeves’s Neo in The Matrix: jacked into an already-totalizing system in which agency is foreclosed within the uni-directional longitudinal scroll of the feed.
The project extends this mapping through horror cinema, online video essays, and pornography — contrasting POV porn as an algorithmically distributed first-person apparatus with earlier theatrical forms structured by hyperlink-style browsing. The textile is a “poor archive” by conventional standards — prone to wear, folding, and degradation — but rich in potential for new narratives.
“What becomes possible — formally and politically — when poetic techniques of fragmentation, citation, and recombination are operationalized as game logics of branching, inventory, and replay?”
Presented At
Manchester Multi-Platform Conference, 2025 — research-creation / practice-based presentation with demonstration of the playable textile.