Throughout the video the masters confer among themselves. Like their slaves, they are naked. Their large penises dangle and jut out. Slaves crawl across the stage of the video's wide-projection, sometimes they crawl on their hands and knees. They also cluster together in sexual orgies. During this clustering the figures twitch. There is a general twitch throughout the video, which represents both an orgasmic shudder (a petite mal), and the threat of the grand mal under torture or social meltdown (infrequently the video will just seem to shut off, as though someone had yanked the plug on the video projectors).

The flickering that goes on in Chan's video inflects Chan's preoccupation with the negative, a negativity which can act inversely as an affirmation of what a viewer sees, and point to the fact that we are seeing at all. Flickering forms a metaphysical axis in Chan's work, one that is hard to pin down but nevertheless present. Were I to write a more theoretically arduous article on Chan I might consider at length this flicker in terms of Theodor Adorno's modernist aesthetic theories, which I suspect Chan has read quite closely. The way Chan talks in his many interviews strikes me as Adornian anyway, however he evokes the names of a host of different philosophers, essayists, and theorists.

Chan's tarrying with the negative also comes across in a series of poems he wrote from 2005 through 2009, Texts, in which many of the words of the poem are crossed out. These "erasures" (the popular term for poetic texts produced by the crossing-out of words) form interesting language effects. Reading the poems for a first time, the words that are crossed-out stand out. Reading them a second time, I read them without the cross-outs. The meaning differs radically depending on whether you read the poem with or without the cross-outs; the first reading yielding a wildly aphoristic poetry, the lines of the poem wending and cutting-off like a poem by Emily Dickinson or Robert Creeley, the second reading yielding something more bare. In the second reading you get something radically reduced, yet equally pithy and contradictory—like a koan or revolutionary slogan from May ‘68. These poems I read beside much of my favorite lyrical poems being written today for the ways that they foreground dialectic tension, and negotiate a theoretical lingo with common speech.