Growing up, I was told that God is always watching me, and that he knew everything that I ever did or thought.  As a teen, I began to leave religion, but these feelings of being watched stayed.  God was replaced with the judgment of my peers and strangers online.  With age, I’ve become increasingly aware that the government and corporations track various aspects of our daily lives.  Yet another presence, watching my every move, waiting for me to mess up.  From the founding of this country, puritanical Christian views have beensystemically incorporated into every facet of society and used to justify this surveillance. 

God is inside the cameras on our phones, on street corners, in our computer data.  God is a corporation.  God is the government.  Their followers are watching my every move and reporting back.  Existing in the public eye does not feel safe.  They look like everyone else, and you can’t tell who a friend is or who is an enforcer.  In Smile, You’re on Camera! angels track our movements through the cameras in their eyes and project these movements onto monitors for all to see. 

There are very few places where I feel safe.  Punk and hardcore music and the communities around them are some of those places.  These communities are built on rejecting authoritarian systems and embracing the uniqueness of individuals.  Within them, I feel comfortable expressing the parts of myself that I usually keep hidden.  I don’t fear ostracization or judgment.  Having a sense of ideological alignment with others helps me embrace my own identity and uniqueness more openly. 

This is reflected in my performance, Resurrection of a Lost Spirit, through the physical act of liberation from the enveloping and constricting garments.  By publicly removing these garments, I am in defiance of the expectations forced onto me by a close-mindedsociety that is defined by values of purity and conformity.  Leaving this, I am reborn as my true self, celebrating all my uniqueness.  Yet this act of defiance is being watched, tracked, and recorded.  I am now marked and remembered as an enemy of the status quo.