A Human Pretending To Be An Artist Pretending To Be A Crayfish

A lecture performance. I sat at a table in a crayfish costume, in front of a screen, and talked while speech recognition transcribed me and projected the transcript behind my head.

The talk is about not knowing whether it is a lecture or a performance, and about deciding not to settle the question. I had taught at an art school for years and had taken to dressing up and interfering with the presentation software, introducing invented theory and fictitious examples, to make the conventions of teaching less certain. Here I was using the same setup I had been trying to get out of: the darkened room, the rows of chairs facing me, the table, the laptop.

The signal crayfish is an invasive species in Danish waters. It was introduced, and is now blamed for being where it was put. I had been working with it for some years in sculpture and online. In this performance it stopped being something I could keep at a distance. In the weeks before, I was waiting for the results of cancer tests. The English word cancer comes from the Greek for crab: the swollen veins around a tumour were thought to resemble a crab's limbs. Russia invaded Ukraine while I was waiting. One night I dreamt that the cancer might turn the Russian president into a crab, or perhaps a crayfish, and woke to a report that he was dying of cancer.

The transcription was done by Google's speech recognition, which is better at place names and brand names than at anything I was trying to say. That is part of the work rather than a fault in it.

There is no conclusion. The piece ends by saying that the conclusion was supposed to go here.

The performance has also been given at Domen, Aarhus (2021), at Performancerum, Aarhus (2023), and at Kalmar Art Museum, Kalmar (2023).