...therefore I am

I have collected 160 songs from myspace.com, whose lyrics all begin with the word “I”. This was done in the spirit of surfing: finding one song, then going to the site of one of their “friends”, checking their songs, and so on; a small errant journey through the millions of pages of myspace, not unlike the path of lightning, I suppose. They are all from relative unknowns, and used with permission. I play them back, 16 at a time, with the “I”’s perfectly lined up. Since all the songs have different lengths of introduction, there is an accumulation of chaos, first 1 song then 2, then 4, etc. until it very nearly achieves white noise or static, from whence, for an instant, the word “I” pops out, followed immediately by static, and petering out to individual songs again. These are panned across the space, so that the songs start in separate locations, and gradually migrate together, the “I”s appearing in one place. Like waves on the seashore. A seashore made up of aspiring songwriters.
A meditation on myspace.com, ego, the internet as it affects self-perception and the politics of the individual user, and then also transference and transcendence, as “I” in a song becomes the you, becomes the listener.