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Admittedly, I have little clue what is happening in most of my classes right now. I have been inspired– by many things, including Diggs’s evocative wordplay and blend of standard and vernacular English– to give my project a more overtly Chinese-diasporic cultural angle. I recently attended a demonstration in front of General Atomics, and was brought back to one of the more long-standing themes I write about– Chinese Americans and our relationship with academia, big tech, and the military industrial complex.

Though I do enjoy watching sports from a cultural and critical angle, it ultimately is a form of escapism for me. At this time, I think I’d like for my piece to be more self-reflective– that is to say, a closer commentary on the identity/space I inhabit. That is to say, present in the moment. I grew up in a place meant to funnel students into tech. Whenever I see the CIA, or I see defense companies advertising on our campus, or when I see the engineering buildings and know that there are students in there who dream of one day slotting themselves into the military industrial complex, into this kind of complicity, it feels like I am back at where I grew up. 

TwERK is, intentionally, difficult to parse through. However, reading it did wake me up a bit, through the malaise of these past couple of weeks, because of how hard I had to focus at certain points in the work. This might be me shooting myself in the foot, but I’m almost interested in formatting my piece so the work contains a level of difficulty in audio adaptation. My brain is fried right now, and I feel as though some sort of annotative format– footnotes, marginalia, etc.– would provide a level of welcome challenge as I attempt to adapt the work into audio. I am mostly making these changes because it genuinely feels like I can not think right now, and I believe that any creative work I am pursuing should meaningfully engage with the site/times, as well as allowing me critical thinking/expressive stimulation. Here’s to hoping this project can become both. 

Again, these are loose ideas that I have yet to synthesize into something meaningful. Let’s see how people react to my workshop piece.