Transmedia Performance Projects

Context & Significance

This body of transmedia work—Black Fire, coreyallenginsberg, and The Polly Experiment—emerged from a desire to test the boundaries of authorship, liveness, and linear storytelling. Created between 2020 and 2024, these pieces unfold across media platforms, resisting categorization and embracing fragmentation, recombination, and repetition as modes of inquiry.

Each project stands alone, but together they ask:

What happens when the artist’s voice is splintered, remixed, or distorted?

What can be uncovered when narrative is freed from a single medium?

Black Fire is a collage-based video and sound experiment that integrates literature and video pastiche to meditate on the survival of Black imagination.

coreyallenginsberg reimagines canonical Beat poetry through a contemporary lens—an Instagram-era howl that fuses spoken word, glitch aesthetics, and found media.

The Polly Experiment is a fever-dream video series that archives the dramaturgical evolution of my play, polly, a dumbshow for smart people desperate to survive the fallout—and exists as virtual theatre—over thirty filmed variations that explore, distort, and reframe the work’s core provocations.

Rather than polished products, these works function as ongoing experiments—artifacts of inquiry, resistance, and adaptation.

My Role & Artistic Contribution
As creator, performer, and editor, I conceived these works—writing or adapting text, designing the video components, and performing in them. This phase of my practice integrated my extensive performance experience. When initially launched, the works appeared on various social media platforms (Youtube, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and Facebook). They were meant to be revisited—looped, reinterpreted, and echoed across platforms.

For all of these projects, I embraced a method of nonlinear composition: juxtaposing voiceover, digital ephemera, text-on-screen, and recurring symbols. The result was a series of cultural “collisions,” conversations between generations, technologies and narratives.

Creative Process & Challenges
These works were shaped in part by the shutdown caused by the Covid19 outbreak. With rehearsal rooms and theaters unavailable, I turned to the tools at hand—phones, laptops, archived film footage, public domain texts—and asked: What stories can still be told? What forms can they take when no one’s in the room but me?

The editing process became its own form of performance, a solo rehearsal in the timeline. This demanded a new kind of rigor and vulnerability, where precision and chaos worked in tandem.

Reception & Impact
These transmedia experiments were shared through curated installations (Methods in Madness, 2024), university classrooms, feedback salons, and online platforms. Their online presence allows for continued engagement—audiences return to rewatch, reinterpret, and re-experience the material at different entry points and have commented extensively about their impact.

The works have:

• Ignited dialogue around authorship, Black subjectivity, and aesthetics

• Informed student experimentation in performance and media-based storytelling

• Served as prototypes for new interdisciplinary collaborations and installation concepts

Why This Work is Significant in My Portfolio
These projects mark a turning point in my practice—not just in medium, but in methodology. They exemplify my commitment to experimental, transdisciplinary work that resists commodification and embraces the messy, recursive process of discovery.

They also reflect my resilience, my refusal to disappear—to stay active in moments of institutional silence, to keep asking what performance can be when stripped of its expected form. That resistance lives in every cut, loop, and glitch.