This paper is a companion piece to a multi-media performance titled Essential Tremors. The paper and Essential Tremors are formed out of shared research, language, and intention. Together, they form the work. The work shirks disciplinary boundaries, as vibrations do, cutting across visual, sonic, material, and intellectual fields to trace the knotted vectors of influence that flow into and out of a single vibrational nexus. Specifically, a phone call between my father and his father on September 11th 1973. While we enter the nexus with the vehicle of a personal narrative, ultimately the work is a loop - a loop imbricated in copper. By mapping the intermodal force of copper as it affects the narrative, the scope of the work expands to gesture towards the embedded extractive realities of digital life, the material legacy of colonial neoliberalism, and the potential of vibration as an interpretive instrument of history.
