“Quotations” is a website and performance that concerns itself with language and its relationship with ventriloquism — the extent to which speaking is always an act of quotation, and the ways in which speech can be coercive, circumscribed, beautiful, a spectacle.

Using the webcam, the website tracks the user's mouth movements. In sync with the user's mouth, the site plays pre-recorded audio of me reading a script I wrote, creating the illusion that my voice is emanating from their body. The script is a collage of different texts, encompassing quotes from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jacques Derrida, retellings of a fairytale and a news report on ice hockey geopolitics, and my own writing.

As an external system that is inherited and learned, language is never truly “mine.” Yet this artificial code of signs nonetheless determines and expresses my very interiority, arguably the closest thing I have to an authentic self. Diction dictates, both ways. As such, speaking activates a site of power, mediation, and coming into being.