Liner Notes for Undressing Cover Songs: The Zone of Pure Doubt
by ATOM-r (Aviva Avnisan and Judd Morrissey)
Please note that a carefully corrected transcription of the performance is available via closed captioning.
The hybrid performance took place on November 4, 2022 at Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago while being streamed live to an audience of The New River: A Journal of Digital Art and Literature at Virginia Tech.
Liner Notes for Undressing Cover Songs: The Zone of Pure Doubt is a mixed reality concert and poetic line-crossing ceremony that engages with the cover song as a means of exploring the ways in which personal and political histories are written, re-written, and written over. The performance draws upon the musical tradition of the liner note to piece together an interwoven structure of music, text, and poetic virtual environments; we set out to make a record with only a jacket so that the lines of each song could become part of its lining.
Liner Notes situates the flamboyant tradition of the rhinestone cowboy in relation to the history of indigenous genocide and expulsion, inverting and queering colonial narratives lodged deep within the American imaginary. The event culminates in a line-crossing ceremony based on historical nautical rituals performed by sailors when crossing the equator. The reimagined ceremony invokes thresholds of gender transition and rebirth as lines of meridian and uses the trope of baptism to honor the taking of a truer name.
