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department press briefings | 2024–26

Department Press Briefings dissects a series of U.S. State Department press briefings delivered by Spokesperson Matthew Miller and Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel over the final sixteen months of the Biden administration. During this period, as the material realities of geopolitics overhauled concepts of international law and human rights, these briefings served as the last rhetorical bulwark for the "rules-based international order." The project responds to this bureaucratic performance: its circular reassurances, careful evasions, engineered vocabulary, and bewildering capacity to sound definitive while revealing little.

The project comprises 16 poems paired with 16 electronic music tracks. Drawing on concrete poetry, each poem isolates every appearance of a chosen keyword within a single briefing, rearranging fragments of carrier phrases into a dense textual lattice that exposes mechanical repetition and recursive logic.

Extracted keywords become input for a custom step sequencer that converts text into temporal patterns. Live studio recordings capture interaction with the sequencer: rhythmic phrases recur in shifting permutations across driving drums and undulating synths, accompanied by fragmented samples of the spokespersons reciting the poems. Each track is the sonic transcoding of its correlating poem — abstract technocratic language disintegrating into broken rhythmic textures.

Across every track, motifs are recursive and non-resolving, creating a tense stasis that mirrors the endless, evasive loops of the diplomatic language from which they are constructed. Department Press Briefings studies how words collapse under their own material weight. Meaning becomes diffuse, abstract, absurd, inert. Yet even hollowed, these words retain their effect in the world.

adam art gallery 2026

excerpts from the accompanying audio series