Department Press Briefings

Mo H. Zareei

Artwork Description:

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.' This work responds to this bureaucratic performance: its circular reassurances, careful evasions, engineered vocabulary, and bewildering capacity to sound definitive while revealing little. The project comprises sixteen poems paired with sixteen pieces of electronic music. Drawing on concrete poetry, each poem isolates different appearances of a chosen keyword within a single briefing, rearranging fragments of carrier phrases into a dense textual lattice that highlights mechanical repetition and recursive logic. Extracted keywords also serve as input for a custom-designed step sequencer that converts text into temporal patterns. The resulting music is studio recordings of live improvised interaction with the sequencer: rhythmic phrases recur in shifting permutations across synchronous drums and undulating synths, accompanied by fragmented samples of the spokespersons 'reciting' the poems. Each audio piece is the sonic transcoding of its correlating poem. 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.