ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) is a major multimedia and performance work created in 1989 by the late American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz in collaboration with composer Ben Neill. Integrating text, video, and music, the work is a poetic and formal meditation on the theme of acceleration and its sensory manifestations. It is through this frame that Wojnarowicz addressed the accelerating AIDS crisis and the politics of AIDS in the United States at that moment.
First presented as a live performance at The Kitchen in New York City in 1989, ITSOFOMO binds the urgency of Wojnarowicz’s texts to a sinister, elastic musical structure by Neill for his futuristic Mutantrumpet and orchestral percussion. In contemporary presentations, Wojnarowicz appears through original archival recordings of his voice, which anchor the work’s moral and emotional force, placing the live performers in direct dialogue with a powerful historical consciousness.
Four videotapes in Wojnarowicz’s signature style run simultaneously for the duration of the work, incorporating imagery characteristic of his visual language. Samples from the National Hollerin’ Contest provide an uncanny choral counterpoint, their strained vocalizations intersecting with Wojnarowicz’s delivery and the music’s forward momentum.
While much of the work is driven by confrontation and acceleration, ITSOFOMO also contains moments of tenderness and reflection, where expressions of love and vulnerability briefly interrupt the forward motion before urgency reasserts itself.
ITSOFOMO has been presented internationally at The Kitchen (New York City, premiere), San Francisco Art Institute, Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle), Exit Art (New York City), Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Bang on a Can Festival (New York City), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Belluard–Bollwerk International (Fribourg, Switzerland), Theater Frascati (Amsterdam), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and The Getty Museum (Los Angeles).
In the present climate of democratic erosion and rising authoritarianism, the reactivation of the work frames historical urgency not as a closed chapter, but as a recurring condition.
“A scathing indictment of the government, the medical establishment, and the religious right.” NY Times
“A powerful piece of contemporary music theater…Compelling, intelligent, and kicks up an apocalyptic storm.” The Wire
“The texts that David Wojnarowicz reads are an antidote to abstraction. Passionate, grounded, and dead-precise, these texts violently reclaim the body by forcing us to experience the visceral reality of space and time. Set against Ben Neill’s delicately composed mutantrumpet, percussion, interactive electronics, and Southern American ethno-music, ITSOFOMO’s forward motion becomes a battle to reclaim the organism of life.”
Sylvere Lotringer