Liner Notes for Undressing Cover Songs: The Zone of Pure Doubt, made in collaboration with Judd Morrissey, was performed on November 3, 2022, for a hybrid audience in person at Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago, IL and online at an event hosted by The New River: A Journal of Digital Art & Literature.

It is an iteration of an ongoing mixed reality performance project titled The Zone of Pure Doubt (2022-present). (See here for the October, 2025 iteration of this work, performed at SAIC Galleries, Chicago, IL).

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. Exploring the transgender experience of transition and rebirth in relation to both histories of settler-colonialism in the United States and to notions of performance, originality, and self-invention, the work juxtaposes haunting 3D Lidar scans of the DuSable Bridge in downtown Chicago, former site of colonial Fort Dearborn, with the bedazzled home of self-taught artist Loy Bowlin, the self-proclaimed “original rhinestone cowboy,” a persona fashioned after a popular 1975 Glen Campbell cover song.

The performance draws upon the musical tradition of the liner note to piece together an interwoven structure of music, text, and poetic virtual environments. Comprised of custom augmented and virtual reality applications for mobile devices, 3d lidar data scans, original music, writing, and video, The Zone of Pure Doubt is a kaleidoscopic experience that queers narratives of colonization and gender 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 re-imagined 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.

The Zone of Pure Doubt pays homage to Archange Ouilmette, a prominent Potowatami woman who witnessed the 1812 Battle of Fort Dearborn from the roof of her house. The work includes a nocturnal song of mixed reality titled Blood Lines, with original lyrics and guitar, that conjures American history’s cyclical patterns across rivers and gulfs of centuries and taps into the storming of uncertain possible futures behind our backs. The song includes an extended improvisatory bridge channeling disparate forces of Archange, Patti Smith, Walter Benjamin, Lalawethika, and the QAnon shaman.

Blending augmented poetics and virtual environments with movement, costuming, and song, The Zone of Pure Doubt collapses live and networked performance spaces into portals of discovery through which viewers experience a layering and collapsing of sites, bodies, architectures and temporalities.

A co-production of The New River: A Journal of Digital Art & Literature & Public Media Institute

Special thanks: Amanda Hodes, Ashley Pope, & Nick Wylie