Since June of 2025, J Andros has been using this piece of performance art to speak against the dehumanization of US fascism and binary thinking, encouraging listeners and readers to think critically and to find new ways to come to a collective future together. Andros’ performance of “American Influencers” uses text that’s broken up with noise, feedback loops, AI sound effects, and direct addresses to technological interference with voice commands like “OK Google,” or “Hey Siri.” The piece is performed with audience interaction, props, and moments of listening and dialogue. Kaitlin McSweeney and Kevin Roth collaborated in making the audio file. Below is some of the text and the audio file.
American Influencers
👤
OK Google, what time is it now? How can I
unsubscribe? My daughter coins a word, was-ing: A past that
continues in the present. Online, I watch a man leap between high-rise
apartments. He leaps only after he hits record. The camera lends so
many eyes to the scene. So much wealth generated, the moment
distributed. Another passenger in the white space of her phone
collects people she may never see again. Our shared Uber cleaves
the city. Inside social, influencers nod. Outside, a man lies under an ad
with the slogan – Find your place in the world. He’s nodding out. Look.
The police are armed to the goddamn gills. They walk among pigeons
and the people between. Oh, this block is a line. I try to reach the end
of my sentence. Cars bend through the neighborhood. A lone minor on
the sidewalk feels eyes behind police car windows, as if the driver was
outside momentarily. We live adrenally in the Untied states. As a target
audience. On and in.
👤
At a distance while driving, I see a Potomac wind-battered sign, Welcome
to Washington DC, but the city name is blitzed by salt spray, so I read it at
a glance as Welcome to War is great. A drop of weight. Ok Google, YouTube
videos I watch are preceded by sponsored videos of grieving parents, their
children lost during school shootings, the shooters radicalized on YouTube.
Google, what despair this puts me in. Arms companies lobby us directly.
Once a friend told me, Life doesn’t have to be like a tumbling plastic bag,
thin as a moth’s wing. History doesn’t have to be the guide. In many versions
of history, the past is reduced to the movement of ore. I prefer Jamaica
Kincaid’s idea, that the world is netted. Poles of influence go from colonizer
to colonized, and back, in endless ripples, which means a perpetrator is also
their victim’s student. From a United airplane, I see news of another plane
crash. It plays continuously on the screen of a sleeping passenger. Against
trade winds, we fly, while an aircraft is upside down and burning. Breaking.
Living with the hour. A man plants graves. Like this we cry. Mud into, of
childhoods. Roses, one means. Shards, senseless while so small.
Once, walking alone, I saw an old woman peer out of her sun-lit
window at me. I smiled at the window that didn’t smile back. But
of course a window is not a woman, though she retreats behind it.
From my words I try to take out synecdoche, how we are compressed
into symbols, expected to be a nation, a body, a representative; some kind
of space that others can comment on and revile. I’m in New York City
looking at a pile to see if there is a person under the trash. Sir, what do
you take for granted? Oh, we’ve confused timely for disposable.
We’ve even become strangers to ourselves. I have nightmares of a
seabed, exposed right before a tsunami. A sea of undeserved pain on
underserved people. Before the project got shuttered for political
reasons, a friend was building a telescope to look at the earliest light,
the dim and multicolored radiation from the Big Bang. Imagine what’s
been glowing before any body, even celestial, existed, before a man
thought he had the power to burn. But a day is made up of the sun, and so
is a season. My daughter watches highways from her window seat, lit
streams, and I want to beg her, please—never lose your mind, don’t
let anyone or anything do your thinking for you. I remind her the future
is dormant as a seed. Together we make puzzles. Anything broken
becomes a puzzle until it gets repaired. We listen to minutes of silence,
then minutes of noise.
🗣️
J Andros [Poet and Artist] 