David Yu’s app x-in-waiting is all about a reinhabitation of the x, the interval, the gap, stasis, the being-stationary that is a transitional phasing wherein one awaits life to come. “To come”—l’avenir, to bring Derrida into the fold, the future that cannot be predicted. Both contrary to and in alignment with Derrida on the “to-come,” one can feel either hopeful or, in a way that transgresses the sanguine hope with which he imbued the horizon of the future, filled with dread about the potentially catastrophic situation. In the temporal torsion of the pandemic, which twisted up collective expectations and betrayed global schemas of life with a shutdown, COVID and its temporality became uneven. Uneven in ways that were systemic, such as premature death following well-etched colonial, bio- and necropolitical axes that were antiblack, ableist, and racial-capitalist. There was an upsurge in resistance to state violence, accompanied by the hope of watching people be released from prison due to COVID and the critical efforts of abolitionists, showing that another world was possible. Yet it was also impossible given the machinations of the state, following the racial calculus of carceral logic, as new studies¹ show that incarcerated white people were predominantly those let out, while Black incarcerated people were held captive. The need for abolition—of the antiblackness and racial capitalism that propel the prison-industrial complex—remains imperative.  

The overwhelming affect circulating through and saturating the quarantine and prevaccinated period (and the vaccine had its own uneven distribution, following capitalism’s path) was one of terror. Where I live in New York City, there were days where it felt like all you heard were ambulances, or else police instructing people to “stay safe.” There was the eerie, loud silence of the city, the uncanniness of a deserted Times Square, like a scene from Vanilla Sky, and Central Park turning into a morgue. x-in-waiting, in its recalibration of the x, relies on different emotions than apprehension and dread, and instead is interested in irony and humour and, ultimately, a kind of companionship and accompaniment that cuts across and through the disjunctive temporality of the pandemic in order to provide care and a version of small-scale solidarity through the quotidian.  

On the one hand, x-in-waiting could be seen as working with an assumptive logic that presumes a certain domestic pandemic subject. On the other hand, the app can be used anywhere, such that one would not need to “mirror” or have a mimetic relation to it but instead can inhabit an open social relation. At first glance, there’s a kind of latent claim to what a universal version of quarantined domestic life might look like, such that we could all be presumed to relate to the activities Yu displays in x-in-waiting, and this would then be the shared ground that substantiates the appeal of the app. Yet the activities are also quotidian, and in that small-scale drama of life there’s a latent tenderness. We watch the artist sit atop his bike, or rather, recline on it in a leisurely way that belies the activity of biking, reminding us that during the pandemic quarantine period the stoppage and bracketing of life sometimes allowed for moments of pause and respite not ordinarily permitted during the accelerated hyperdrive of capitalist hustle. One of the most profound interventions of the performance is troubling the dualism between the many and the one by playing with the personal function of what Sherri Turkle terms “subjective technology” and “evocative objects.”² The artist is seemingly alone and yet everyone is participating; a solitary act is part of a social ensemble facilitated by the app.

David Yu writes: