Appropriating the karaoke video’s familiar apparatus, foregrounding its inconspicuous decorative backdrop, and populating it with dancing non-human bodies of equally decorative and lowly origin, the work imagines karaoke as a transformational aesthetic event exploring the methods of animating joy and revelry as potent and durable modes of emancipatory politics.
Drawing on affirmative ethics of feminist posthumanism, ‘Made Me Soft’ reimagines those performing bodies, cast historically as spectacle and disciplined to entertain, as the bodies performing as if already free. Assembled from found footage and internet circulation, the work aims to offer them not as a metaphor or critique, but as figures of becoming, as a method enacted through transposition and inhabitation.
Set amid the rigid, phallocentric grammar of a contemporary techno-positivist society, the work turns hardcore soft. It seeks emancipation not through the heroic logic of mastery and conquest, but in softness, dissolution, and total transposition of material against systemically imposed economies of extraction.