Complementarity and the Uncertainty Principle as …eprints.qut.edu.au/29938/1/Leah_Mercer_Thesis.pdfComplementarity, the Uncertainty Principle, Zeitgeist, metanarrative, metaphor,

Complementarity and the Uncertainty Principle as Aesthetic Principles. The Practice and Performance of

The Physics Project

Leah Gwenyth Mercer B.A. (Hons 1), M.A. (UQ)

M.F.A. (CalArts)

Performance Studies, Creative Industries Faculty

QUT

PhD 2009

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Keywords

Complementarity, Contemporary Performance, Live and Mediated Performance,

Metanarrative, Metaphor, Prosthesis, Quantum Mechanics, Synchronicity,

Transcendence, the Uncertainty Principle and Zeitgeist.

Abstract

Using the generative processes developed over two stages of creative development

and the performance of The Physics Project at the Loft at the Creative Industries

Precinct at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) from 5th – 8th April

2006 as a case study, this exegesis considers how the principles of contemporary

physics can be reframed as aesthetic principles in the creation of contemporary

performance. The Physics Project is an original performance work that melds live

performance, video and web-casting and overlaps an exploration of personal identity

with the physics of space, time, light and complementarity. It considers the acts of

translation between the language of physics and the language of contemporary

performance that occur via process and form. This exegesis also examines the

devices in contemporary performance making and contemporary performance that

extend the reach of the performance, including the integration of the live and the

mediated and the use of metanarratives.

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Table of Contents

Keywords ...................................................................................................................... ii Abstract ......................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ...........................................................................................................3 Statement of Original Authorship ..................................................................................5 Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................6 Chapter One: Introduction ...........................................................................................7

Genesis .......................................................................................................................7 Focus ..........................................................................................................................8 Key Words / Key Research Questions .......................................................................9 Methodology ..............................................................................................................9 Creative Practice as Research ..................................................................................11 Action Research .......................................................................................................12 Stages of Research ...................................................................................................12 The Physics Project..................................................................................................13 Stage One .................................................................................................................13 Stage Two ................................................................................................................14 Stage Three ..............................................................................................................18

Chapter Two: Quantum Mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle and Complementarity – In Physics and Beyond..............................................................................................22

Introduction..............................................................................................................22 Quantum Mechanics.................................................................................................22 The Uncertainty Principle ........................................................................................24 Complementarity......................................................................................................26 Metaphoric Thinking................................................................................................27 The Uncertainty Principle and the ‘Science Wars’ ..................................................30 Complementarity as a mode of consciousness.........................................................33 The Universal Mind .................................................................................................35 Network Thinking ....................................................................................................36 The Kaleidoscope and the Gymnast.........................................................................39

Chapter Three: ‘Flights’ And ‘Perchings’ – Aesthetic and Theoretical Principles at Work in The Physics Project .......................................................................................45

Introduction..............................................................................................................45 Part One: Writing – Process, Content and Form......................................................46 Self and Other, Individual Mind and Universal Mind .............................................46 Multiple Identities ....................................................................................................48 The Nonmatrixed Body............................................................................................49 Presence and Identity in Live and Mediatised Performance....................................51 Technology as Prosthesis .........................................................................................53 Part Two: Directing..................................................................................................62 The Moving Body ....................................................................................................63 Directing Live and Mediated Performances ............................................................66 Actors as Observer-Participants...............................................................................68 The Open-Ended Body.............................................................................................69 Mediated Actors .......................................................................................................74 The Mediated Actor as Observer-Participant...........................................................78

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Chapter Four: Conclusion –Prosthesis/Transcendence .............................................80 Introduction..............................................................................................................80 The Prosthetic Aesthetic ..........................................................................................80 Transcendence..........................................................................................................82 A Refrain..................................................................................................................85

Appendix One:............................................................................................................87 Selected Entries from Seven Black Journals (April 2003 - April 2006)......................87 Appendix Two: .........................................................................................................113 The Physics Project work-in-progress script (Magdalena version) ...........................113 Appendix Three:.......................................................................................................131 The Physics Project script (Loft version)...................................................................131 Appendix Four: ........................................................................................................162 Photographs from The Physics Project (Magdalena and Loft versions)....................162 Appendix Five:..........................................................................................................171 The Physics Project DVD (Loft version)...................................................................171 Appendix Six:............................................................................................................172 Reviews The Physics Project .....................................................................................172 Reference List ............................................................................................................183

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Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet

requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the

best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously

published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

SIGNED_______________________________

DATE ____23 January 2009_____________

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to my supervisor Professor Brad Haseman for his patience and support. Thank you to my friend and collaborator Amantha May and to my friends Stace Callaghan and Nigel Pearn for their support throughout the process. The production of The Physics Project (Stages 1, 2 and 3) has been the result of a large collaborative team. I would like to acknowledge their efforts. The Physics Project (Stage 3 – Loft Version): Production Team: David Murray (Production Manager) Robert D. Clark (Composer/Sound Designer) Conan Fitzpatrick (Video Artist) Kieran Swann (Scenic Designer) Beck Clark (Costume Designer) Megan Williams (Costume Designer) Gabby LeBrun (Assistant Director) Flloyd Kennedy (Accent Coach) Matt Logan (Lighting Designer) Ben Hamley (Stage Manager) Jon Penn (Lighting Operator) Louise Daley (Sound Operator) Chris Ford (AV Operator) Performers: Margi Brown Ash (Narrator) Erica Field (Australian Woman) Hanna Wood (Miranda) Emily Thomas (Female Voice/Blonde Woman/Jean Harlow) Errin Rodger (Gabriel) Amantha May (American Woman) William May (Father) Grace and Georgia (Two Little Girls) QUT Staff: Sandra Gattenhof, Brad Haseman, Judith Maclean, Daniel Madison, George Meijer, Nigel Oram, Jill Standfield, Warren Sutton, Zane Trow. The Physics Project (Stage 2 – Magdalena/Ripley-Greer studio version and Stage 1 – Charas version) Brisbane: Christine Akers, Stace Callaghan, Joanne Loth, Jodie Roche, Jeff Wehl New York: Fred Backus, Lisa Batey, Anna Guttormsgard, Dan Hope, Gioia Marchese, Jessica Pagan, Erin O’Leary, Alan Rosenthal, Damen Scranton, Alyssa Simon, Jenny Torino, Dana Wise.

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Chapter One: Introduction

“Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than van Gogh’s sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist’s discoveries impose his [sic] own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his [sic]; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer’s frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet” (Koestler, 1964, p.252).

Genesis

The Physics Project began as a means of maintaining a friendship and creative

collaboration despite vast geographical distance. In 1999 after three intense years of

artistic collaboration with American writer/director Amantha May, I graduated with

an MFA (Directing for Theatre) from the California Institute of the Arts. In that

American summer of 1999, as I prepared to return home and an inevitable disruption

to a friendship loomed, I came across a book by Leonard Shlain called Art &

Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light. This book, which makes

connections between the seemingly oppositional fields of art and science from

Ancient Greece through to the twentieth century, operates from the thesis that

“[r]evolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of

reality” and that both are ways of organising “our perceptions of nature”. Here Shlain

(1991, p.16) invokes the common ground provided by Émile Zola’s definition of art:

“Nature as seen through a temperament” and the derivation of the Greek word physis

which means ‘nature’. In similar fashion, in her book Pythagoras’ Trousers: God,

Physics, and the Gender Wars, Margaret Wertheim (1997, p.248), a feminist

philosopher of science, argues that “the mathematical relations we discover in nature

are not beyond nature, but are merely another facet of nature”, one of many ways of

knowing the world. Part of the political project of her book is to urge the reader to

decide what they want from physics and “what purposes we want it to serve”

(Wertheim, 1997, p.252). Reading Shlain, and later Wertheim, at that particular point

in my life became a way of reflecting upon that time and the catalyst for The Physics

Project.

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Focus

That the future of a friendship and creative collaboration would soon become

dependent on internet and telephony systems ensured that science and its practical

applications within communication technologies became the tools to facilitate and

shape both the friendship and the creative project. Thus from the very beginning

science was present in both the content and the form of The Physics Project. This,

coupled with Wertheim’s call to put science to the purposes we wish it serve, saw my

collaborator and I begin an investigation into a field of knowledge that was new to

us. Correspondences between my readings of physics and performance also began to

emerge. Physics is an investigation into the nature of reality and physicists break

down the natural world into its components in order to analyse the relationship

between its parts and these components: time, motion, matter, space and light. These

same components are also the stuff of performance and provide rich metaphoric

possibilities in the depiction of human experiences of identity, perspective and

relationship. While what “artists do and what scientists do is certainly very

different”, both are:

concerned with creating order, with making sense of the world and our experience of it, with discovering or fashioning unity from diversity (Storr, 2001, p.104).

In addition, contemporary performance in a Western, first-world context is primarily

shaped by its relationships with technology, although many of the technologies

involved in stage-production have been naturalised to the point of invisibility.

Technology and media have “altered [the] human experience of reality and our

consciousness of being, … influenced our identity and psychology, … [and]

transformed our relationship with our bodies and environment” (Berghaus, 2005,

p.240). Here then, in the nexus between the components of physics and of

performance emerged metaphor, where time, motion, matter, space and light could

provide the fodder for the content and form in what would become The Physics

Project.

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Key Words / Key Research Questions

The Physics Project thus began to unfold around a series of parallel investigations. In

Chapter Two I will give the background as to how advances in Quantum physics at

the beginning of last century rocked the epistemological foundation of classical

physics. As an arts practitioner whose funding at both a personal and institutional

level has had to be fought for much harder than my compatriots in the sciences, I was

interested in staging the dissolution of the paradigmatic distinctions between physics

and art. Furthermore, the same body of content knowledge (Quantum Mechanics)

also shows us that Quantum particles, once twinned, continue to act in relation to one

another although they no longer inhabit the same geographic space. This fact offered

a useful metaphor for the artistic collaboration I continued to deepen with Amantha

May while separated by great distances and incompatible time zones. The mediatised

nature of this collaboration, eventually found its way into the final performance

outcomes. The two research questions that The Physics Project thus evolved around,

are:

1. How can the principles of contemporary physics be reframed as aesthetic

principles for the creation of contemporary performance?

2. What are the devices in contemporary performance making and contemporary

performance that extend the reach of the performance?

The first question is principally addressed in Chapter Three and the second question

in Chapter Four. In formulating responses to these questions, some key words will be

defined in subsequent chapters. These words include: Quantum Mechanics,

Complementarity, the Uncertainty Principle, Zeitgeist, metanarrative, metaphor,

Synchronicity, prosthesis and transcendence.

Methodology

In keeping with a postmodern tendency to look for meaning by cobbling together

‘whatever works’ from diverse spiritual, psychoanalytic and ethical frames of

reference, the characters in The Physics Project consciously employ diverse

metanarratives in the construction of their individual identities. The dramaturgical

sub-stratum for this theatrical material has been correspondingly varied and rich.To

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keep track of the various inputs over a five-year creative process (four of which have

been conducted within a practice-led PhD), I have maintained descriptive journals

that document the brainstorming sessions, research, rehearsals, meetings with

supervisors and feedback processes of the different stages of creative development.

These seven black journals, dated between April 2003 and April 2006, are referred to

throughout this exegesis and selected highlights from them constitute Appendix One.

As well as repositories of ‘interesting things’, ‘thoughts under investigation’ ‘areas

of future concern’ etc., these field notes have also been the prime location for critical

reflection, which I understand to be a special form of problem solving where ideas

are connected and underlying beliefs and knowledges are taken into account. These

journals have helped me identify the initial and developing patterns of my thinking

over the duration of the project. Discussions in Chapter Two will highlight making as

a form of thinking. Rather than reflection on actions past, I view performance as a

mode of reflection-in-action. I draw upon Donald Schon’s work here (1983, 1987) to

account for the consideration of practice in the light of knowledge and beliefs. For

The Physics Project my work as a reflective practitioner was channelled into my

roles as co-writer and director of the work.

The journals, my primary and secondary research, the scripts for The Physics Project

and the live work that was presented at the Loft at the Creative Industries Precinct at

QUT from 5th – 8th April 2006 have provided the material for this exegesis. With a

background in textual criticism, I have brought these sources together and treated

them as discursive documents which, although taking different form, all articulate a

relation of truth to the same content. An important formal mechanism of feedback, or

triangulation, has been many fruitful discussions with my supervisor Dr Brad

Haseman. There have also been many informal, but equally fruitful discussions with

professional colleagues and the performance casts. Thus the methodology of my

practice-led PhD evolved in action. This exegesis constitutes 25% of what is

examinable, while the bulk of the PhD (the remaining 75%) is in the live work

performed in April 2006 at the Loft. The appendices that accompany this document

(the journal highlights, scripts, photographs and DVD recording of the live

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performance) are meant only as supporting documentation and are not intended for

examination.

Creative Practice as Research

In her article “Inquiry through Practice”, Carole Gray positions practice-led research

as part of a research tradition that began to emerge in the 1970s and early 1980s. Her

concept of practice-led research is firstly:

research which is initiated in practice, where questions, problems, challenges are identified and formed by the needs of practice and practitioners; and secondly, that the research strategy is carried out through practice, using predominantly methodologies and specific methods familiar to us as practitioners (Gray, 1996, p.3).

Nancy de Freitas uses the term “reflective practice” to describe “planned and

deliberate activities that engage the artist or designer in a critical manner with the

relationship between conceptual, theoretical and practical concerns” (de Freitas,

1996, pp.1-2). My creative practice as co-writer/director/collaborator/researcher on

The Physics Project generated a cycle of reflective and cumulative enquiry that

forms the basis of my methodology ‘in’ and ‘through’ practice. For the purposes of

this study I will focus on two of the three stages of creative development for The

Physics Project, the Magdalena version and the Loft version (as outlined below) and

specifically the questions formed by the needs of practice that emerged from these

stages of the creative work’s development. Using my creative practice as

methodology is about validating the processes that I have designed and then

facilitated on the floor of the rehearsal room and in the collaboration between my co-

creator/writer, designers and actors. Applied to performance and performance-

making, interdependence is evident in the use of multiple performance modalities,

including Tadashi Suzuki’s actor training, Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints and

Composition work, Gabrielle Roth’s “5 Rhythms”, yoga, Kyogen, Meyerhold

techniques and traditional Stanislavski-based actor training (all of which I have

trained in and which come into play when devising, directing or writing).

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Action Research

Action research was coined by the social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1944 to

describe a form of research which married “the experimental approach of social

science with programs of social action” and education. According to Lewin the

stages of action research were: “analysis, fact-finding, conceptualisation, planning,

execution, more fact-finding or evaluation; and then a repetition of this whole circle

of activities; indeed a spiral of such circles” (quoted by Kemmis, 1982, p.13). In its

contemporary usage Stephen Kemmis and Mervyn Wilkinson (1998, p.21) describe

the process of action research as “a spiral of self-reflective cycles” including:

− planning a change − acting and observing the process and consequences of the change − reflecting on these processes and consequences, and then − re-planning, and so forth.

Each stage of The Physics Project was considered according to these four phases.

Allowances have been made for the overlapping nature of experience as the process

was more “fluid, open and responsive” (Kemmis and Wilkinson, 1998, p.21) than

this spiral image suggests. Comparisons between these phases and their outcomes

have been considered and the unique outcomes of each stage along the trajectory of

development have in turn informed the subsequent processes and interpretative

possibilities of the work. The major through-line of observation and reflection

revolves around the generation and utilisation of content and form, within the

performance-making processes as well as the actual performances.

Stages of Research

Regarding documentation of practice-led research, Nancy de Freitas uses the term

“active documentation” to refer to the visual and textual documentation produced in

practice which “forms the basis of the emerging exegesis” (de Freitas, 1996, p.1).

The Physics Project (Magdalena version) as well as subsequent creative

developments were rich sites for gathering data. My discussion of the process and

findings forms the background of material against which the central study and the

bulk of the PhD (the Loft version of The Physics Project) can be considered. As both

participant and observer (reflective practitioner) I tracked the development of the

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project through journals, research, script drafts, videotape and photography. I used

the following methods of documenting my artistic practice:

Journal – my principal means of gathering data and tracking the creative decisions and footprints left behind by process. My journals (Appendix One) document my own process in relation to the material and face-to-face, telephone and email discussions with my collaborators.

Visual – including video and still images. This visual documentation includes photographs of the Magdalena and Loft versions of The Physics Project (Appendix Four) and video documentation of the Loft performance (Appendix Five).

Alongside my creative practice as a means of gathering both content for and context

to my creative work, I also researched the fields of contemporary physics and

contemporary performance.

The Physics Project

The Physics Project performance presented at the Loft in April 2006 represented the

third stage of its creative development. It shall hereafter be referred to as the Loft

version. While the first two stages are not being examined as part of my study, a

quick summation of their focus and findings will help to contextualise the subsequent

development of the creative work. The residue of these stages dictated significant

jumping-off points for the Loft version, not the least of which were findings that

proved to be dead ends and so were abandoned for that stage, thereby opening up

new pathways and clarifying the eventual focus of that later work.

Stage One

The process began in February 2001 when Amantha and I undertook a four-week

creative development workshop with six actors in New York City, where she was

now based. This workshop was built around the writings of physicists such as Albert

Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Pierre Laplace, Stephen Hawking and theoretical

concepts like Isaac Newton's Laws, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle,

Niels Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, Quantum Physics, Black Holes and

Superstring Theory (a discussion of these theories will follow). From this workshop

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six characters, a series of narrative events and a performance style was generated.

This represented Stage One of The Physics Project and had a showing at Charas, an

arts community centre in New York.

Stage Two

After Stage One I returned to Australia, but didn’t pick up the project again until late

2002. Then, in February 2003 we had a second creative development and showing at

the Ripley-Greer studios in New York. After another period of rehearsal in Brisbane,

this work-in-progress showing was performed at the Magdalena Australia Festival at

the Brisbane Powerhouse in April 2003 (live in Brisbane with a simultaneous New

York performance webcast into the Powerhouse). The work presented at Magdalena

– the culmination of the first two stages – used live and video performance, web-

casting technology, narrative and physical theatre to theatricalise the changing

theories of physics as they relate to time, motion, matter, space and light and to the

individual experiences of reality, contradiction and perspective in the experiences of

our six characters. It investigated the relative and malleable nature of reality and

focused on how these six characters sought, made and repelled connections in those

realities. In this version different theories of physics were applied to and embodied

by different characters. For example, ‘Evan’ was a response to investigating the

speed of light, ‘Anna’ sub-atomic particles and ‘Dinah’ synchronicity. ‘Grace’ was

obsessed with time (trying to contain and control it), ‘Jack’ was obsessed with space

(lacking a point of reference and stability) and yet ‘Grace’ (time) and ‘Jack’ (space)

could not exist without each other. Once they realise this they are able to embody the

‘space time continuum’ as articulated by Einstein’s teacher Hermann Minkowski

who said: “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere

shadows” (quoted by Lorentz, 1923, p.75). The central protagonist ‘Fiona M.’ was an

isolated observer who wanted to act, not just react, to instigate, not just be instigated

and who learnt that even the very act of observation makes her a participant.

This second stage introduced video artists, internet directors and a lighting designer

into the collaborative process. The addition of these artists provided a necessary

further dimension to the shifting realities that the project explored and helped to

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create an integrated theatrical space consisting of multiple realities for our characters

to inhabit. Some characters were played by Americans in New York, some by

Australians in Brisbane, some characters live, others projected, and some alternated

between live and projected. As a result, the simultaneous showings in two countries

at the Magdalena Festival activated one of the central ideas of the work, namely that

the content of the piece should also be reflected in the form.

At the workshop session showing of the project at the Ripley-Greer studios in New

York in February 2003 (prior to Magdalena), we structured time for informal

feedback from our invited audience which was then incorporated into the Magdalena

showing. My journal entry from the day after that showing documents some of the

audience feedback and hints at some of the directions that we would later follow:

The conflation of physics and performance felt more successful when sound or image was attached to the theories, otherwise the audience felt they were purely being “talked to”, they were more interested in watching the physics happen, rather than being told how it’s interpreted (Appendix One, p.87).

While Magdalena provided us with the opportunity to perform for a more diverse

audience, we did not have a structured feedback session. Instead, our jumping-off

points for the next stage of creative development came from repeated commentary by

some individuals on a few elements and from our own inclinations. For example, we

knew that the piece was too heavily weighted towards representing the theories of

physics we were investigating via a heavy-handed equation between characters and

theories of physics. For example, equating ‘Evan’ with the speed of light, ‘Anna’

with sub-aromic particles, ‘Dinah’ with synchronicity, ‘Grace’ with time and ‘Jack’

with space was more analogy than metaphor and the result felt simplistic. However it

had been a useful tool for embodying our new knowledge of physics. Now that we

had a greater command of this material, it was clear that our next step was to

relinquish the physics text and instead utilise the ideas and images they provoked and

to pay more attention to character and narrative. Thus we became more interested in

showing the effects of different theories of physics rather than explaining what those

theories were. A note made after that New York showing illustrates this point:

The protagonist’s journey is from a disconnected individual to one who is aware of her connection to others (Appendix One, p.87).

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This note instigates one of the preoccupations that would remain constant throughout

the project’s various stages. The progression of an isolated individual to one who has

a sense of connection to her wider community became a central focus in the work.

The decision to include web-casting was initially a practical solution to the fact that

Amantha and I live so far apart and want to make theatre together. Nevertheless, at

every point along the path we sought to tie the use of technology to the content. For

example, video fractures real time and allows points of the past to be experienced in

the present, while web-casting allows multiple and distant spaces to exist

simultaneously. Such effects could be used to illuminate Einstein’s hypothesis that a

body travelling at the speed of light would not experience time and space in a linear

fashion and while such direct representations of physics theory was not part of our

intention, such discoveries were useful signposts. They heralded the importance of

tying the technology to the dramaturgy. Since working with this technology is an

expensive and complicated undertaking, the Magdalena showing was the first time

we and our web-casting technicians got to work with it. Previously in rehearsals we

had substituted pre-recorded video for live web-cast interaction between Australian

and American actors. Without time or money to consider or choreograph the web-

casting component, projecting the simultaneous New York showing onto a screen

behind the performance in Brisbane was a stopgap measure that ended up working as

a kind of improvised additional layer.

Finally seeing the web-casting in action on the day of the showing was a thrill for

those working on the project, but not necessarily one easily shared by the audience

who had not stood in both spaces and were not privy to the excitement of recognising

friends in distant places. For an unknowing audience, the ‘reality effect’ of the web-

casting tended to be lost: they read it simply as an extra narrative layer. More

importantly, the moments of simultaneity and repetition created between the web-

casting and the live performance didn’t translate to an audience in the way they did

to us. So we recognized that for the next stage of The Physics Project we needed to

integrate the web-casting into the narrative and choreograph it accordingly.

However, one discovery made in the moment of presenting the piece before an

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audience was the way that the pixellated quality of the web-cast image evoked

distance in a way the clear video images didn’t.

The build-up to Magdalena took place in a hothouse of creative ferment. Time and

resource constraints led to decisions that took us in directions beyond those dictated

by the hard science we’d researched. The physicist Paul Dirac (quoted by Mackay,

1991, p.74) said: “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have

them fit experiments”. During the most hectic of these times we took Dirac’s quote

to heart and let our choices be guided by what I’ll call ‘theatrical instinct’,

privileging the poetic over the strictly scientific. In some cases we’d discover later

that these choices did, in fact, end up supporting the theories we were interpreting.

For example, in the Magdalena version, the character Anna was based on properties

of the subatomic, or quantum world, where it is possible for one particle to exist in

two places at once. We used two actors in the role, one in the U.S., one in Australia,

to theatricalise this phenomenon. Originally, the two actors were intended to mirror

one another. This was not theatrically interesting, however, and eventually we found

ways of staging the Australian Anna in opposition to her videographic ‘twin’ that

created a whole other layer of narrative possibility. Ultimately, we realised this

supported the fact that in the quantum world a single particle cannot only exist in

more than one place, but can follow more than one path of motion at the same time

even though it is only one particle.

Allowing the piece to develop in layers and alternating between the theoretical, the

practical and the theatrical was one of the great benefits of a long developmental

process. With the steps taken at Magdalena, we were left with a wealth of reflections.

The Magdalena showing affirmed our desire to fight for, if not the primacy, at least

the equal presence of the live body in a highly-mediatised performance. We felt we

had created a ‘hybrid’ performance in that its form was something of mixed character

and its content was derived from unlike sources. In addition, we felt that we were

synthesising connections between disparate metanarratives and interacting with

technology and physics in a way that was meaningful to us as feminist performance

makers. Both of us have had traditionally female educational backgrounds, mostly art

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and very little science, and favour a collaborative working process, form and content-

focus that is identifiably feminist in its approach and agenda.

Stage Three

Since Magdalena, Amantha and I continued to refine and define the script,

communicating via e-mail, telephone and a final shared writing workshop, in which

we worked together in the same geographic space and time in New York in

October/November 2005. During this stage of the development we articulated what

was missing from the Magdalena version: the absence of a narrative / heart /

emotional centre, a clearly-integrated ‘why’. We concluded that while the equation

we staged between characters and theories of physics had been a useful device for us

to embody difficult theories and so increase our experiential understanding of them,

it no longer served a more pressing need, namely a personal connection to the

material. In response we examined how the ideas and concepts explored in the first

two versions of the project resonated with our own lives, how they connected to our

personal stories. Both Amantha and I have been deeply affected by the suicide of

those close to us. Amantha lost her mother when she was nineteen. I lost my best

friend when I was twenty. These events have rippled throughout lives. In both

conscious and unconscious ways we have been processing versions of these

experiences ever since.

For Amantha the ideas coalesced in a story about her parents in Mexico, a story she

had heard repeatedly as a child about a time in her parents’ life before she was born.

For a child growing up in mid-west Illinois this seemed exotic and romantic.

Embellished through countless retellings, the story was also evidenced in the tourist

artefacts they had brought back and which she had grown up with. It also survived in

the form of a short story that Amantha’s mother had written and left in a trunk full of

other unpublished work. As Amantha faced becoming older than the age her mother

had lived to, this story kept returning to her.

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For me, living with the repercussions of the death of a friend kept in place a query

about how friendships continue to change and are reframed throughout life and after

a death. Are relationships in any sense permanent? How can relationships be

conducted over great distances both literally and metaphysically?

What we created in the third stage development of The Physics Project is a kind of

collage, two separate alternating stories (mine called The Uncertainty Principle and

Amantha’s called Life as Light) which gradually intersect, overlap and then merge.

Taken individually, it is possible to see the different stylistic choices at work in these

two stories. Style, I believe, is the response in form to a question asked by content.

What you see is very much the product of who we are, how we think. Amantha’s

story is a kind of South American baroque: florid, open, direct in passion, language

and images. My story is much more elliptical, whimsical, emotionally analytical but

not always driving forward. In my story The Uncertainty Principle, a character

named only ‘Australian Woman’ (played by Erica Field) spends most of the time

alone in a room, with her memories of her dead friend and a younger version of

herself (represented in video as ‘Two Little Girls played by my niece Grace and her

friend Georgia). The ‘Australian Woman’s’ only outside contact is with a long-

distance friend, a character named only ‘American woman’ (played by Amantha)

who appears via web-casting and another character called the ‘Narrator’ (played by

Margi Brown Ash) who is the future calling her forward, perhaps an older version of

herself. In Amantha’s story, Life as Light, the protagonist ‘Miranda’ (played by

Hanna Wood), an American scientist living in Australia, conducts an experiment in

which she conjures up memories of her dead mother, ‘Female Voice/Vlonde

Woman/Jean Harlow’ (played by Emily Thomas) interacting with a young Mexican

man called ‘Gabriel’ (played by Errin Rodgers).Multiple versions of ‘Miranda’s’

memories are played out, including: images from her own memories; from her

mother’s short story, memories she makes up and versions offered by her ‘Father’

(played by Amantha’s father William May) (via web-cast/video). Ultimately,

‘Miranda’ tries to piece together a version of these memories she can live with.

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In The Uncertainty Principle the ‘Narrator’ acts as a repository of possibilities for the

‘Australian Woman’, most particularly as evidence that she and the world are never

separate. Here I was influenced by the philosophy and writings of French feminist

philosopher and playwright Hélène Cixous:

Sometimes we live the wars between nations as personal events. Sometimes a private drama appears like a war or natural catastrophe. Sometimes the two wars, the personal and the national, coincide. Sometimes there is peace on one side (in one’s heart) and war on the other. I and the world are never separate. The one is the double or the metaphor of the other (Cixous, 1994, p.xv).

A quote from Leonardo DaVinci appears as a refrain at the beginning of each of the

four sections of The Uncertainty Principle:

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself…if you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself…and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight (quoted by Wallace, 1966, p.12).

The repetition of this quote accentuates a block in the ‘Australian Woman’, one that

shifts when immediately prior to her final monologue:

The NARRATOR reaches up towards the text, covers the ‘P’ in ‘PLIGHT’ and the word ‘LIGHT’ appears as all the other words melt away. She appears to pluck the word from the screen and carry light in her hand (May and Mercer, 2006, p.24), (Appendix Three, p.155).

This is part of the push towards the depiction of a character moving from a state of

isolation to a sense of connection to her wider community and an example of one

way in which the use of technology was dramaturgically connected to the work. In

addition to the DaVinci quote, the ‘Narrator’s’ text is littered with literary and

popular culture references. These text and image references include Lewis Carroll’s

Through the Looking Glass, Einstein’s special theory of relativity, Charlotte Brontë’s

Jane Eyre and 1930s’ movie star Jean Harlow. Thus the ‘Narrator’ embodies Cixous’

description of the self:

We are the learned or ignorant caretakers of several memories. When I write, language remembers without my knowing or indeed with my knowing, remembers the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the whole of literature, each book (Cixous, 1994, p.xxi).

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As such, the ‘Narrator’ moves through an internal landscape of abstracted times and

spaces, rendered mostly through poetic language and heightened images.

In Life as Light ‘Miranda’ spends most of the performance in silhouette, a two-

dimensional version of herself, a cipher, interacting with figments of her mother in

Mexico, with a ‘Number Voice’ quoting sections of the 39th Mersenne Prime

Number (representing her desire to find a pattern around which to structure herself),

with her father via web-cast living in the United States. In each case her interactions

are conducted primarily via technology, a resource that she wields with great

expertise.

The Loft version of The Physics Project is a performance work that melds live

performance, video and web-casting, and maps an exploration of personal identity

onto the physics of space, time, light and Complementarity. Within the work: space

is thematically correlated with home/self; time with memory; light with

imagination/inspiration and Complementarity with the reconciliation of opposites.

Each of the four scenes of The Uncertainty Principle and Life as Light correspond to

these themes and are sub-titled accordingly. The generation of this stage of the work

placed a different slant on what is important about Dirac’s quote – ‘it is more

important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiments’. From

this perspective the central component of his statement becomes that it is not

important what comes first – the theory or the practice. And more, it is not even

important if the theory is ‘correct’ or not. What is important is that there is this thing

called ‘beauty’ that supersedes all. Questions like: ‘Who is the arbiter of this

beauty?’ ‘What are its criteria?’ are less important than the acknowledgement that it

is the first port of call.

In the following chapter, I will discuss the theoretical background to this perspective,

in an account of the connections between Quantum Mechanics and the thinking and

making of The Physics Project.

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Chapter Two: Quantum Mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle and Complementarity – In Physics and

Beyond

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” says the White Queen to Alice (Carroll, 1872, pp.70-71).

Introduction

This chapter provides a brief overview of Quantum Mechanics, concentrating on

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity. These

concepts in twentieth-century physics will form the basis for further discussion in

Chapter Three, in which they operate as the context for significant artistic choices

made during the development of the performance work, The Physics Project. As a

reflective arts-practitioner, I was initially concerned with the ethical dimension of

taking one geography of knowledge (physics) and re-territorialising it within another

(contemporary performance making). However my research led me to see that the

epistemological shifts present in, or perhaps driven by, developments in Quantum

Mechanics are part of the consciousness of our age. The concepts presented herein

have manifestations in fields well beyond physics, for they are part of a twentieth-

century tradition of refiguring our understandings about inner and outer, participant

and observer, thinker and maker.

Quantum Mechanics

As if with an eye to the fine de siecle, the idea of the quantum was first expressed in

1900 when the physicist Max Planck published a paper announcing that “certain

experimental results could only be understood if energy was emitted or absorbed in

certain discrete packets, which he called ‘quanta’” (quoted by Kumar, 1999, p.1).

The implications of this discovery, which did not accord with the existing Newtonian

framework in which energy was transmitted in an endless stream, were not lost on

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the classically-minded Planck who prophesied: “believe me it will expand … It will

go in all fields. We have to live with it” (quoted by Kumar, 1999, p.2).

Planck’s discovery of the ‘quanta’ led Einstein to propose “that light itself sometimes

came in quanta” (Wick, 1995, p.9) and in his paper entitled “On a heuristic viewpoint

concerning the production and transformation of light”, published in 1905, Einstein

(p.133) conceded that this theory when “applied to the phenomena of the creation

and conversion of light” may very well contradict experience. He then went on to

conjecture that light “had two distinct and seemingly opposing natures: a wavelike

aspect and a particlelike aspect” (quoted by Shlain, 1991, p.22). With this

suggestion, Einstein opened the door to what physicist F. David Peat (2002, p.3)

describes as a split that “encapsulates much of the history of twentieth century

physics and concerns the essential dislocation between certainty and uncertainty”.

This split, which “has profound implications for the nature of reality and for our total

world view” (Davies, 1990, p.2), became known as the ‘wave-particle paradox’. The

contradiction is clearly articulated by Einstein and Infeld (1938, p.263):

There seems no likelihood of forming a consistent description of the phenomena of light by a choice of only one of the two possible languages. It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do!

This paradox existed without any resolution, despite considerable attention from

physicists, for at least twenty years. Einstein commented on the unease in the physics

community at having to use “two theories of light, both indispensable, and – as one

must admit today despite 20 years of tremendous effort on the part of theoretical

physicists – without any logical connection” (quoted by Kumar, 1999, p.3).

Compounding the dilemma, physicist Louis de Broglie suggested in 1923 “that the

wave-duality applied not only to light but to matter as well” (quoted by Greene,

2000, p.103).

A conceptual framework was emerging in which what happened in the microscopic

realm no longer accorded with, or related to, the workings of the macroscopic realm.

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Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity (published in 1905 and 1915

respectively) had already required:

…dramatic changes in our worldview when things are moving very quickly or when they are very massive, [but] Quantum Mechanics reveals that the universe has equally if not more startling properties when examined on atomic and subatomic distance scales …. The only thing we know with certainty is that quantum mechanics absolutely and unequivocally shows us that a number of basic concepts essential to our understanding of the familiar everyday world fail to have any meaning when our focus narrows to the microscopic realm (Greene, 2001, pp.86-87).

The problem that lies at the centre of Quantum Mechanics is one of interpretation.

What does it mean? What does it reveal about the nature of reality? The Uncertainty

Principle and Complementarity provide an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

The reality they envisage is “not an objective, but a phenomenal one. It did not exist

in the absence of observation” (Kumar, 1999, p.1). The Uncertainty Principle and

Complementarity and the repercussions they have when considering the connection

between observation and reality are the animating concepts for my research.

The Uncertainty Principle

One of the basic concepts that had to be rethought in the light of Quantum Mechanics

was the, hitherto, clear separation between observer and observed. In The Tao of

Physics Fritjof Capra (1975, p.88) describes how “for every particle there exists an

antiparticle with equal mass and opposite charge”. When you shine light on a

particle, some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle, thereby

indicating its position; however, that same wave of light will disturb the particle and

change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. Einstein’s objection to

Quantum Mechanics was precisely upon these grounds. It ran contrary to his

understanding of “the programmatic aim of all physics: namely, the complete

description of any (individual) real situation (as it supposedly exists irrespective of

any act of observation or substantiation)” (quoted by Schilpp, 1970, p.667). For

Einstein, quantum theory “seemed to make what happens in the world depend upon

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we who observe it” and this conflicted with his deep desires for “an objective

description of nature” (Wheeler quoted by Buckley and Peat, 1996, p.90). 1

In 1927 Heisenberg published a paper2 describing the phenomena of indeterminacy

that surrounded observations of the quantum world. The Uncertainty Principle that

bears his name recognises that in the attempt to measure two quantities “such as the

position and momentum (mass times velocity) simultaneously” (Wick, 1995, p.34)

uncertainty must be factored in, thereby rendering any ‘conclusions’ inconclusive.

Since, according to Quantum Mechanics “there is always a minimal disruption that

we cause to the electron’s velocity through our measurement of its position” (Greene,

2000, p.113), the Uncertainty Principle proposes that while “classical concepts such

as position, momentum, time, and energy” retained their meaning, “certain pairs of

quantities had lost their role” (Wick, 1995, p.36). That the act of observation changes

what is being observed at the sub-atomic level meant that subjectivity, “the anathema

of all science (and the creative wellspring of all art)”, had to be admitted into the

realm of physics:

According to the new physics, observer and observed are somehow connected, and the inner domain of subjective thought turns out to be intimately conjoined to the external sphere of objective facts (Shlain, 1991, p.23).

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle had ramifications for contemporary philosophy

and also for art-making. As Richard Schechner (2002, p.99) describes it, while artists

may not have been following Heisenberg literally, the metaphoric implications of the

Uncertainty Principle resound throughout twentieth century art-making:

Arts, once the home of strict choreography, precise scores, and fixed mise-en-scènes, were opened to chance processes, unpredictable eruptions from the unconscious, and improvisation.

1 Einstein’s continuing belief in the existence of a connection between all observable physical phenomena was apparent in his unsuccessful search for a Unified Field Theory or Theory of Everything (TOE) as it is sometimes known: a theory that could account for both gravitational fields and quantum phenomena. 2 English translation published in Wheeler and Zurek, 1983, pp.62-84.

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Complementarity

For Niels Bohr, the material effects of observing the Quantum world along with the

“persistent ‘doubleness’” of the wave-particle paradox led him to suggest a “general

framework” for thinking about Quantum Mechanics which became known as the

Copenhagen Interpretation of Complementarity (Whitaker, 1996, p.8). According to

Complementarity, complete knowledge of the phenomena of light requires a

description of both wave and particle properties and, depending on the experimental

arrangement, the behaviour of such phenomena as light and electrons is sometimes

wave-like and sometimes particle-like. Thus, as opposed to the “unified picture of a

phenomenon” afforded by classical physics, Complementarity forces us “to

simultaneously hold in our minds two mutually inconsistent descriptions”

(Greenstein and Zajonc, 2006, p.91).

Armed with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Bohr came closest to defining what

he meant by Complementarity when he presented his work at a conference in 1927:

… [the quantum of action] forces us to adopt a new mode of description designated as complementary in the sense that any given application of classical concepts precludes the simultaneous use of other classical concepts which in a different connection are equally necessary for the elucidation of the phenomena (Bohr, 1961, p.10).

Bohr introduced a neologism ‘Complementarity’ to describe the “relation between

two descriptions or sets of concepts which, though mutually exclusive, are

nevertheless both necessary for an exhaustive description of the situation” (emphasis

added, Jammer, 1966, p.348). The emphasis here on the relation between two

seemingly oppositional concepts is important for my research in that it evokes the co-

habitation and overlapping of different planes of knowing and it helped to assuage

my concerns about re-territorialising one geography of knowledge making within

another.

Central to Bohr’s thinking is that “it is not meaningful to talk about the system at all

separate from the apparatus observing it” (Harrison, 2000, p.7). For Bohr the logical

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conclusion of this line of thinking was that observation constructs reality. This is not

to suggest that Bohr denied “the existence of an objective reality ‘out there’; but he

thought it meaningless to ask any questions about what this reality was” (Kumar,

1999, p.5). The concerns of a community of physicists about an evolving quantum

world foreshadowed what was to become a major epistemological preoccupation of

the twentieth century – the situated nature of knowledge and the theoretical

impossibility of neutrality. This intellectual territory is charted through Bohr’s

proposition that the subjective act of deciding what to measure affects the outcome,

and Heisenberg’s (1958, p.24) consideration of the nature of reality in which he

highlights the inadequacy of all binary divisions:

[T]he common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate and leads us into difficulties. Thus even in science the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man’s [sic] investigation of nature.

In a more contemporary style, physicist John Wheeler (quoted by Buckley and Peat,

1996, pp.90-91) summarises it thus:

We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is me, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron we have to shatter that plate glass; we have to reach in there … So the old word observer simply has to be crossed off the books, and we must put in the new word participator. In this way we’ve come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.

Metaphoric Thinking

When Planck said that the consequences of Quantum Mechanics would ‘go in all

fields’, he was alluding to scientific practice. Tracing the consequences of Quantum

Mechanics into other spheres of discourse was an important step towards reframing it

as an aesthetic principle in The Physics Project. According to physicist J.G.

Daugman, one way of mapping how significant scientific shifts find expression in

wider spheres of discourse is via what he termed “our enclosure within metaphors”

(Daugman, 2001, p.25).

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In his essay “Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory”, Daugman (2001, p.23) discusses

how “the explanatory metaphors of any given era” invariably “incorporate the

devices and spectacles of the day”. He cites how the Greek concept of the four

humours – a theory of physiology in which the state of an individual’s health, mind

and character depends upon a balance among the four elemental fluids: blood, yellow

bile, phlegm, and black bile – metaphorically relates to “the technological experience

of the day”. In the case of Ancient Greece this was “water technology”, for example

fountains, pumps, water clocks (2001, p.24). Daugman also uses this theory to

explain why clockwork mechanisms and metaphors proliferated during the

seventeenth century and gives as an example Thomas Hobbes’ book on human

nature De Homine (published in 1658). According to Daugman, Hobbes’ treatise

“sought to trace the physical basis for ideas and associations to minute mechanical

notions in the head, and thus to turn epistemology into a branch of the new physics of

Newtonian mechanics”. In similar fashion, Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme

machine (first published in English in 1749) describes the human brain and body as

“a machine that winds its own springs”. Daugman (2001, p.28) then turns to the

writings of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. For Marx and Freud the “devices of the

day” were pressurised steam engines and hydraulic construction. As Daugman points

out, for Marx, “economic and social forms are the superstructure thrown up by an

invisible ‘deep structure’ of class struggle”, while for Freud, “the individual’s

conscious experience and behaviour are the manifestation of a surging unconscious

libidinal struggle between desire and repression”. Thus just like water or steam

pressure “the internal social or psychic pressures must inevitably express

themselves.”

What, then, for a quantum way of knowing? Shlain argues that the advent of

Quantum Mechanics dissolved one of the paradigmatic distinctions between physics

and art. Describing the distinction, Shlain (1991, p.22) says that, until the twentieth

century, physicists had concerned themselves with the “objective arena of motions,

things, and forces” and “avoided any mention of the inner thoughts that related to the

outer world” whereas artists have traditionally been concerned with “external reality”

as well as “with the inner realm of emotions, myths, dreams, and the spirit”.

Quantum Mechanics presaged an image of the world as “a network of relations”

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rather than “a collection of separate but coupled things” (Davies, 1983, p.112).

Physicist David Bohm (1980, p.134) identifies this development as a “centrally

relevant change in descriptive order”, namely:

the dropping of the notion of analysis of the world into relatively autonomous parts, separately existent but in interaction. Rather, the primary emphasis is now on undivided wholeness, in which the observing instrument is not separated from what is observed.

Bohr, himself, believed his theory of Complementarity to have a much wider

application than the discipline of physics. He held it to be “a universal principle”

with links “to human consciousness and to the way the mind works” (Peat, 2002,

p.8). He believed its core principle, “the recognition of Complementarity between

seemingly irreconcilable points of view could help people to get rid of prejudices

fostering intolerance” and envisaged it as part of the system of general education,

that “better than any religion” would “afford people the guidance they needed”

(Rosenfeld, 1963, p.52, p.54). Psychologist and education theorist Jerome S. Bruner

(1972, p.xiii) recalled a conversation with Bohr in which the physicist described

how, in fact, he first conceived of Complementarity in relation to disciplining his

son. Bohr wondered whether “he, constrained both by his duty as father and by his

fondness for his son [could], know his son simultaneously both in the light of love

and in the light of justice? Were these not mutually non-convertible ways of

knowing?” In that same conversation he also discussed how “introspection as an act

dispelled the very emotion that one strove to describe” (Holton, 1973, p.149). Thus

for Bohr, Complementarity had a working application beyond the field of quantum

physics. He noted that, “as regards analysis and synthesis in other fields of

knowledge, we are confronted with situations reminding us of the situation in

quantum physics”. Thus, “the integrity of living organisms and the characteristics of

conscious individuals and human cultures present features of wholeness, the account

of which implies a typical complementary mode of description” (Bohr, 1963, p.7).

Although Bohr’s intent was clearly broad-ranging, there has been resistance from

within the scientific establishment to the movement of the specific content of

Quantum Mechanics across disciplinary boundaries – the process in and through

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which significant ideas become wide-ranging tropes. One area in which this series of

contestations may be clearly seen is in the debates that were collectively termed the

‘Science Wars’. The arguments regarding disciplinary integrity and subject-specific

forms of knowing have a valency in terms of this exegesis, for they rehearse some

criticisms that could be levelled at my own series of appropriations made during the

course of The Physics Project. While respecting some of the institutional impulses

behind such defences of subject-specific knowledge, The Physics Project attempted

to take a much more encompassing view. In essence the performance outcome aimed

at creating a fictive / aesthetic frame that could hold both disciplinary dimensions in

place at once. It is a way of (quite literally) rehearsing the dissolution of the

paradigmatic distinctions about the ways of knowing that traditionally have belonged

either to ‘science’ or ‘art’.

The Uncertainty Principle and the ‘Science Wars’

The ‘Science Wars’ have involved many agents, but for the purposes of this

discussion I will focus on two philosophers of science, Larry Laudan and Alan D.

Sokal, and two cultural theorists, Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz. At the crux

of this debate is what Laudan (1990, p.x) articulates about those who appropriate

conclusions “from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety

of social cum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted”.

According to Laudan, this appropriation is one of the most “pernicious

manifestation[s] of anti-intellectualism in our time”. His colleague, physicist Sokal

(1996, p.339) maintains that in the “dialogue on the Left between humanists and

natural scientists” it is necessary to uphold the role of the scientist, namely to

discover “objective truth[s]” about the “external world”.

According to Aronowitz, (1997, p.107), however, “the issue is not whether reality

exists, but whether knowledge of it is ‘transparent.’” He argues that Sokal fails to

take into account the subjectivity of science and scientists. He points to the fact that

what has been considered an ‘objective truth’ in one century has been proven wrong

in the next. This doesn’t mean that what was invented as a result of this ‘wrong truth’

suddenly became ‘un-invented’, but proves that ‘truths’ based on those ideas can

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become superseded. Although Newton’s Principia, “is rooted in the mechanical

worldview that was widely shared by scientists and laypersons in his time”, his so-

called “true discoveries” were subsequently “overturned by ‘better’ truths” afforded

by relativity and Quantum Mechanics” (Aronowitz, 1997, p.108). For Aronowitz, it

becomes logical to imagine that, like Newton’s theories, the ‘truths’ of relativity and

Quantum Mechanics might be equally rooted in contemporary worldviews.

Sokal (1996, p.344) concedes that present theories in computer science, quantum

electronics, solid-state physics and Quantum Mechanics “might be erroneous” and

yet, his “abiding faith that … the rigorous application of scientific method” will

eventually yield nature’s “unmediated truth” remains sacrosanct (Aronowitz, 1997,

p.107). In fact, Sokal claims that questioning or even drawing attention to what

extent “the truths” or even “the false statements erroneously believed to be true” are

“influenced (or determined) by social, economic, political, cultural and ideological

factors” is a waste of time. He understands these factors to have no bearing on the

epistemological question, for example of whether atoms behave according to the

laws of Quantum Mechanics (Sokal, 1996, p.339).

Ross (1991, p.26), describes this collision as a “stand-off, between the empiricist’s

claim that non-context-dependent beliefs exist and that they can be true, and the

culturalist’s claim that beliefs are only socially accepted as true”. Within the

scientific paradigm there are, however, working models of socially-situated

knowledge. The book Laboratory Life documents philosopher Bruno Latour’s two-

year study of the daily processes of a laboratory, the Salk Institute for Biological

Studies in California. Written in collaboration with sociologist Steve Woolgar,

Latour (1986, p.275) describes his role as an “ethnographer (or participant observer)”

and acknowledges that the very act of his observation impacts upon what he is

observing and that such factors as his own cultural “notions of what science is like”

will necessarily become part of the study. As Aronowitz (1997, p.110) discusses, by

highlighting “the relevance of conversation, inscriptions, and machine technologies

for producing knowledge”, Latour and Woolgar’s study demonstrates “science as a

social process”.

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The lengths to which certain practitioners and science philosophers go in order to

preserve the ‘integrity’ of the empirical sciences raises some issues that are

significant for my research. Specifically, that the irony of defending the objectivity

of science whilst simultaneously defending Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and

the wave-particle paradox, both of which suggest that indeterminacy is a property of

physical matter seems lost. More particularly, it is fascinating to note that Sokal’s

ultimate rhetorical strategy in the debate was to publish a hoax article called

“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum

Gravity” in the ‘Science Wars’ editions of the Cultural Studies journal Social Text. In

a subsequent article he wrote defending this parody, he described it as “a mélange of

truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs” that parallel “the genre it

is meant to satirize” (Sokal, 1996, p.338). That the ultimate defence for the pure

scientist, took the form of an imaginative flight of fancy suggests that Sokal has no

problem appropriating the attributes of art for the purposes of science even while his

colleague Laudan argues against employing conclusions from science for other

purposes.

Rather than ‘pernicious anti-intellectualism or time wasting’, appropriating

conclusions and exposing assumptions from science and employing them for my own

purposes is not only my artistic prerogative, but also, as Daugman (2001, p.25)

suggests, the inevitable result of my “enclosure within metaphor”. Rather than

Laudan’s isolationalism this, in fact, enacts the “fruitful developments” which

Heisenberg advocates “at those points where two different lines of thought meet”:

These lines may have their roots in quite different part of human culture, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions; hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow (Heisenberg, 1990, p.175).

The Physics Project developed at just such an intersection.

Another significant offshoot of the ‘Science Wars’ is that it provides a useful

framework for considering practice-led research. In much of quantum physics what

is called observation is often actually “the effects of machine technologies”. These

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effects are read, but “the reading is theory-laden. Which means pure description

based on observation is not possible” (Aronowitz, 1997, p.110). Situating knowledge

within the apparatus that constructs it proceeds from Giambattista Vico, the

eighteenth century Italian humanist and philosopher, who wrote that “the true and the

made are interchangeable” (Moevs, 2003, p.265). According to Vico, since “the

world of civil society has certainly been made by men [sic]” it follows that “its

principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own mind”

(Vico, 1984, p.331). Inverting the prevailing Cartesian reliance on observation as the

source of all knowledge, Vico claimed that the principles of human society are “more

certain than the principles governing the natural world, because civil society is a

human creation” (Burke, 1985, p.78). He aligned creativity and art (i.e., making)

with the human “as the human reveals, makes, and knows the world by unfolding its

own nature - simultaneously ever-new and ever-old – in the concrete particularity of

history” (Moevs, 2003, p.265). Contained here is the idea that making is a valid form

of knowing, a central precept in the practice-led research paradigm.

In his manifesto for practice-led research, Brad Haseman (2006, p.100) argues that

rather than merely positioning “practice within the research process”, performative

research seeks to “lead research through practice”. It is certainly true that in my own

creative practice, the thinking and the knowing occurred alongside the making and

the doing: the two processes have been complementary and synchronous, rather than

hierarchical or sequenced. However, the protocols of an exegesis for a higher degree

require that these two processes be disentwined. To this end, I have, at times,

fruitfully reformulated my practice along the lines of the wave-particle paradox: the

same artistic behaviours may be conceived as both ‘thinking-like’ and ‘making-like’.

For the purposes of this exegesis, this current chapter is conceived as bearing witness

to the frameworks in which my thinking has been constructed. The subsequent

chapter will chart, more specifically, how this thinking impacted upon the making.

Complementarity as a mode of consciousness

Within both the ‘artistic’ and the ‘scientific’ regimes of knowledge the same set of

arguments are rehearsed, albeit under different guises. On the one hand, as evidenced

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in my discussion of the ‘Science Wars’, the hard sciences defend against any notion

of the social construction of knowledge. Within arts practice, the movement flows

the other way as artists attempt to reframe their making as a specific form of

knowing. My own thoughts concur with the following thinking from some in the

scientific community. Wheeler proposes “that Mind and Universe, like wave and

particle, constitute another complementary pair” (quoted by Shlain, 1991, p.23).

Shlain (1991, p.24) argues for the complementarity of art and physics: “They are

simply two different but complementary facets of a single description of the world.”

It should be noted that not all cultures or epochs have experienced resistance to such

a concept. For the Japanese physicist, Hideki Yukawa, assimilating the idea of

Complementarity presented none of the difficulties raised by his Western colleagues:

“Bohr's argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us; ... we in Japan have

not been corrupted by Aristotle" (quoted by Rosenfeld, 1963, p.47). There are

conceptual correlations here with Shlain’s (1991, p.28) point that “admixing the

inner space of dream, trance, and myth with the events of everyday existence

characterized every belief system worldwide before the Greeks” and that common

across these diverse thought systems is the shared conviction “that there is no sharp

line dividing the ‘in here’ space of imagination or ‘subjective’ reality and the ‘out

there’ space of ‘objective’ reality”. The introduction of rationalism by the Greeks

“sharply separated their system from others based upon religious beliefs” (Shlain,

1991, p.29). One particularly evocative example of just such a belief system can be

found in the Chinese system of philosophy known as the Hua-yen school of

Buddhism. The Hua-yen use the image of Indra’s Net to depict their understanding

of existence. According to this image suspended above the god Indra’s palace is a net

that “stretches out infinitely in all directions”. At every intersection of cords there is

a jewel and if you look closely at each jewel you will see “reflected all the other

jewels in the net” (Cook, 1977, p.2). This image symbolises the Hua-yen belief in a

cosmos “in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the

members of the cosmos”.

In my work I positioned Quantum Mechanics as the metaphoric device of the day

and as such have sought to articulate a framework in which seemingly irreconcilable

ways of knowing co-exist. This framework accounts for:

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• The appropriation of one way of knowing into another e.g., using physics to

create performance, and;

• Practice-led research as a clear example of the complementarity of thinking

and making.

Before discussing some practical examples of how this thinking influenced the

making (process, form and content) of The Physics Project, it is necessary to

consider how metaphoric thinking and Quantum Mechanics relate to the Zeitgeist.

The Universal Mind

The term Zeitgeist is usually applied when “discoveries in unrelated fields begin to

appear at the same time, as if they are connected, but the thread that connects them is

clearly not causal” (Shlain, 1991, p.24). The concept doesn’t, however, contain any

clues as to how “this force that precipitates action-at-a-distance originates and

propagates” (Shlain, 1991, p.381). One rich example of the Zeitgeist in action can be

found in the concomitant emergence of Bohr’s theory of Complementarity and Carl

Jung’s theory of Synchronicity. In fact, Shlain (1991, p.24) calls Jung’s

Synchronicity “the internal corollary in human experience of this external quantum

idea.” Jung (1985, p.36) describes Synchronicity as “a coincidence in time of two or

more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning.” Like

Bohr’s Complementarity, Jung’s Synchronicity “repudiated the conventional

doctrine of causality” (Shlain, 1991, p.24) proposing instead that “certain events in

the universe cluster together into meaningful patterns without recourse to the normal

pushes and pulls of causality” (Peat, 1987, p.35).

How does an age produce a certain consciousness? One facet of thought within this

field suggests the concept of the Universal Mind. For some, like American

psychologist philosopher William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience,

this region of connected consciousness went by “the natural appellation” of God

(1985, p.516). Others, like Catholic theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de

Chardin (1966, p.63), avoided the God designation, choosing instead the term

‘noosphere’, from the Greek word ‘noos’ for ‘mind’ to depict what he described as

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“a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls.” For Teilhard de

Chardin (1965, p.104) the ‘noosphere’ is “a sort of cosmic vortex, which, after

generating each one of us individually, pushes further, through the building of

collective units, on its steady course towards a continuous and simultaneous increase

of complexity and consciousness”. Furthermore, for Teilhard de Chardin, “anytime

the consciousness of any one individual in the world is raised, the general quality and

quantity of mind in the world is enhanced” (Shlain, 1991, p.383).

Network Thinking

Today, the theology of Teilhard de Chardin seems prescient in the way it describes,

metaphorically, many of the functions and forms of the Internet. Contemporary

critics have recognised in the ‘noosphere’ the Net, “a stage of evolution characterized

by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fuelled by human

consciousness” (Cobb Kreisberg, 1996, p.2).

In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle (1996, p.22) develops Daugman’s thinking on

the wider acculturation of certain powerful metaphors. She proposes that what

dreams and beasts were to Freud and Darwin, the computer has become for us.

According to Turkle, hysteria, the paradigmatic symptom of Freud’s patients, has

now been replaced by Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Based on a study of

Multi-User Domains, on-line sites where a man can log on as a woman, a woman as

a man or old as young, Turkle (1996, p.260, p.21) argues that the internet,

encourages people “to develop ideas about identity as multiplicity” and our

increasing entwined relationships with technology means that “old distinctions

between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more

complex”. Harvey Blume (1997, p.4), argues that if this is “the age in which artificial

and organic intelligence cross-pollinate as never before, autism speaks to that

relation far more profoundly than MPD can ever do”.

Since autism is now considered a neurological rather than psychological disorder, the

diagnostic emphasis is now on “wiring over psyche, neurons over consciousness,

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circuitry over childhood” (Blume, 1997, p.6). Noting the resemblance between

neurons and “bits, bytes, and computer registers”, Blume (1997, p.7) describes the

neurologically-defined human as “a giant step towards – and concession to – the

cyborg”. Using Temple Grandin’s, “a high-functioning autistic” description of

autism from the inside, Blume (1997, pp.7-8) explains that “autistics have tended to

think of themselves in mechanical, electrical, or increasingly today, cybernetic

terms”, because:

They do not experience themselves as shielded from the outside world but as continuous -- helplessly, uncontrollably continuous -- with it.

For Grandin, the Internet and the Web are “the best possible metaphors for her own

brand of thinking” which is “visual and concrete, as opposed to verbal and

conceptual” (Blume, 1997, p.9). For Blume (1997, p.2), whose article is partly

questioning why examples of autism are so prevalent in contemporary media, the

answer is “because of the Zeitgeist. And the Zeitgeist, in turn, at least for now, seems

never to stray too far from the Internet”. From advocating a metaphoric relationship

between autism and the Zeitgeist, Blume goes further to describe how “for many

autistics the Internet is Braille”, in that it allows them to extend the reach of their

communication and also, since the very nature of their condition makes physical

contact draining, it allows them to thrive. As one autistic writer interviewed by

Blume (1997, pp.10-11) puts it:

The level of communication possible via the Internet is changing our lives, ending our isolation, and giving us the strength to insist on the validity of our own experiences and observations.

In his article “Autism, Thomas Pynchon, and Capitalism as Cosmic Law” James

Horton (2004, p.1) draws connections between the novels of Thomas Pynchon,

autism “and the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism”. He coins the term

“collective autism”, which he says “underlies the drive for materialistic and

technological consumption in capitalist society”. Employing child psychotherapist,

Bruno Bettelheim’s (1967, p.84) definition of “the cosmic law” that rules infantile

autism, namely “you must never hope that anything can change”, Horton (2004, p.5)

applies this law to capitalist societies (in his reading of Pynchon’s novels) and

concludes that ‘collective autism’ can “manifest itself in human relationships to

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capital and machinery”. From this Horton (2004, pp.9-10) concludes that the spread

of technology and capitalism renders “more and more people spiritually and

physically destitute” and that putting one’s faith in machinery of any sort is:

…an act of despair and deceit no matter how it disguises itself. In effect, one has submitted oneself to a machine teleology – ‘machine teleology’ being a contradiction in terms, a never-ending spinning like the autist’s top. One’s faith has been placed in an end which is not an end but a meaningless eternity.

Contained within this series of connections and associations, Daugman, Turkle,

Blume and Horton field a number of important jumping-off points for The Physics

Project. In keeping with Turkle and Blume’s writing on MPD and autism

respectively as peculiarly modern modes of being, the characters within The Physics

Project were presented with a positional uncertainty in terms of self. From a

dramaturgical perspective, the aim was to stage and then enquire into how

subjectivities cope with existence in two simultaneous states – both an attenuated

sense of self and a state of being extremely connected – and as part of this process,

the internet, as the defining cultural artefact of our age, operated as part of the stage

machinery as well as a narrative element. In so doing the characters in The Physics

Project enacted Complementarity as a mode of consciousness.

Another way to describe this could be to say that the characters of The Physics

Project possessed what could be termed a generalised sense of postmodern anxiety.

In his seminal work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Jean-

François Lyotard (1986, p.xxiv) defines postmodernity “as incredulity towards

metanarratives” and predicts that future societies will fall:

less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as structuralism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. They are many different language games – a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches – local determinism.

Having only the language and the forms of the postmodern to express and

counteract their own sense of struggle, the characters in The Physics Project

sought legitimacy by drawing attention to the operation of their own narratives.

More in line, perhaps, with what Fredric Jameson says in his Foreword to

Lyotard’s work as “not the disappearance of the great master-narratives, but their

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passage underground as it were, their continuing but now unconscious effectivity

as a way of ‘thinking about’ and acting in our current situation” (Jameson, 1986,

p.xii). P.L. Travers, best known as the author of Mary Poppins but also a prolific

writer on the connections between myth, fairytale and spirituality, says almost the

same thing, albeit in a much more poetic rendering when she says:

Fairytales live in us, endlessly growing, repeating their themes, ringing like great bells. If we forget them, still they are not lost. They go underground, like secret rivers, and emerge the brighter for the dark journey (Travers, 1943, p.7).

Thus Jameson posits and Travers foreshadows one of the key contradictions of

postmodernism, namely that the denial of metanarratives is in itself a

metanarrative. The contradiction they embrace is, to paraphrase Heisenberg, that

‘the only unity worth having is a unity of plurality” (Rubery, 1998, p.2). The

Physics Project ends up dismissing Horton’s somewhat techno-phobic

conclusions, ultimately advocating that a faith in the machinery of the age may in

fact be spiritually and physically enriching, akin to Umberto Eco’s (1990, p.24)

notion that the computer “is a spiritual machine”. This self-conscious application

of specific metanarratives by the characters in The Physics Project acknowledges

and embodies what Daugman labels our ‘enclosure within metaphors’ – since as I

have demonstrated the operational metanarrative is the device of the day. It

generates a multi-faceted interpretive paradigm, a kind of bowerbird ne[s]t, a

gathering of narrative particles which artfully arranged, became the knowing of

The Physics Project.

The Kaleidoscope and the Gymnast

Here then is the framework from which The Physics Project began its journey and

more specifically, the ideological apparatus in which I as a writer/director/reflective

practitioner operated. Before moving into an analysis of the aesthetic implications

this framework had for the creation of The Physics Project, I would first like to

demonstrate how Bohr’s ideological apparatus provides a deeper insight into

Complementarity’s non-scientific origins and applications, and how this in turn

broadened my own frame of reference. Bohr’s framework for ‘thinking about

thinking’ cannot be isolated from ‘the devices of the day’ or, to use Bohr’s language,

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the ‘apparatus’ for observing thinking, in fact, influenced its outcome. In Bohr’s case

these ‘devices’ included the psychological metanarratives prescribed by the

American philosopher-psychologist William James and the philosophical framework

provided by the triumvirate of nineteenth-century Danish philosophers Søren

Kierkegaard, Harald Høffding and Poul Martin Møller. In a non-scientific paradigm

Bohr’s apparatus (and my own) finds contemporary resonance in Eco’s conception of

the ‘kaleidoscopic’ and Robert Lepage’s notion of the “gymnastic mind”. In Eco’s

definition of an open work or more specifically “works in movement”, he highlights

the work’s “kaleidoscopic capacity to suggest themselves in constantly renewed

aspects” (Eco, 1989, p.12). For Eco, such works are conceived of like a net, a

rhizome, “or a labyrinth, a vast aggregation of units of meaning among which an

infinite variety of connections can be made” (Robey, 1989, p.xxii). In his conception

of the ‘gymnastic’, Québecois writer/director/performer Lepage, describes audiences

with “gymnastic minds” and “a gymnastic understanding of things”. He says that

they “have to live in this world and understand all these abbreviations, codes,

symbols and colours. So they want to use these muscles they have” in their

interaction with contemporary performance (quoted by Delgado and Heritage, 1996,

p.148).

Bohr often quoted from the novel Tale of a Danish Student (published as an

unfinished manuscript) by Møller. This book, which has never been translated into

English and which he encouraged his colleagues to read once they had mastered

enough Danish, assisted Bohr’s understanding of “the dialectical process of cognition

which had so long been obscured by the unilateral development of epistemology on

the basis of ‘Aristotelian logic and Platonic idealism” (Rosenfeld, 1963, p.47). Tale

of a Danish Student contains a dialogue between a university student (the licentiate)

and his cousin (Alex) in which the licentiate attempts to explain why it has taken him

so long to write his dissertation:

… certainly I have seen before thoughts put on paper; but since I have come distinctly to perceive the contradiction implied in such an action, I feel completely incapable of forming a single written sentence. And although experience has shown innumerable times that it can be done, I torture myself to solve the unaccountable puzzle, how one can think, talk, or write. You see, my friend, a movement presupposes a direction. The mind cannot proceed without moving along a certain line; but before

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following this line, it must already have thought it. Therefore one has already thought every thought before one thinks it. Thus every thought, which seems the work of a minute, presupposes an eternity. This could almost drive me to madness. How could then any thought arise, since it must have existed before it is produced? When you write a sentence, you must have it in your head before you write it; but before you have it in your head, you must have thought it, otherwise how could you know that a sentence can be produced: And before you think it, you must have had an idea of it, otherwise how could it have occurred to you to think it? And so it goes on to infinity, and this infinity is enclosed in an instant.

“Bless me,” said Fritz with indifference, “while you are proving that thoughts cannot move, yours are proceeding briskly forth!”

“That is just the knot,” replied the licentiate. “This increases the hopeless mix-up, which no mortal can ever sort out. The insight into the impossibility of thinking contains itself an impossibility, the recognition of which again implies an inexplicable contradiction” (Møller quoted by Rosenfeld, 1963, p.48).

This dilemma, one no doubt shared by many a PhD candidate (myself included),

reverberates with the writing of Cixous and with the image of interconnectedness

represented by Indra’s Net. In addition to an example of dialectical thinking, this text

enacts what was to become central to Bohr’s view of the role of observation:

Thus on many occasions man [sic] divides himself into two persons, one of whom tries to fool the other, while a third one, who in fact is the same as the other two, is filled with wonder at this confusion. In short, thinking becomes dramatic and quietly acts the most complicated plots with itself and for itself; and the spectator again and again becomes the actor” (Møller quoted by Rosenfeld, 1963, p.49).

What both Møller and Bohr advocate then, is the complementarity of “contemplation

and volition” (Miller, 2002, p.3). Also, by employing a non-scientific example of

Complementarity in action Bohr demonstrates his aim that “all experience…must be

capable of being communicated by human means of expression, and it is on this basis

that we shall approach the question of unity of knowledge” (Bohr, 1963, p.14).

In his article entitled “Niels Bohr’s Contribution to Epistemology” Rosenfeld (1963,

p.49) describes how his colleague Bohr “vividly realized” that “theories are but

temporary resting places of the mind on the unending road to knowledge”. In his

consideration of Bohr’s philosophical influences, physics philosopher Max Jammer

traces this notion to the theories of William James. In The Principles of Psychology

James:

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…compares consciousness to the flight of a bird: a journey alternating between flights and perchings. The ‘perchings’ represent resting places occupied by sense impressions, and the ‘flights’ are thoughts which form relations between the impressions (Wick, 1995, p.164).

Trying to contemplate such a ‘flight’ at the moment it occurs is virtually impossible.

Indeed James (1952, p.158) described the process of such introspective analysis as

like “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks”. Such

thinking seems to parallel Bohr’s belief that Complementarity is suited to situations

analogous to “the general difficulty in the formation of human ideas, inherent in the

distinction between subject and object” (Bohr, 1961, p.91). While there is some

contention about whether Bohr read James before or after his articulation of

Complementarity3 his relationship with Høffding and its influence on

Complementarity is well documented4. Høffding was a close friend of Bohr’s father

and Bohr attended his lectures at the University of Copenhagen and so was exposed

to his philosophical writings (Jammer, 1966, p.173). It is also known that Høffding

visited James in Massachusetts in 1904 and that James wrote the Preface to

Høffding’s work The Problems of Philosophy, published in 1905. So, whether by his

first-hand knowledge of James or his intimacy with the philosophy of Høffding (and

thus James by one remove) it is possible to embellish the context in which Bohr

thought about thinking and how that was influenced by the thinkers of his day.

While James was his peer and colleague, Høffding’s work was principally influenced

by Kierkegaard, whose “emphasis on the practical value of thought”, his so-called

“qualitative dialectic” was characterised by “his insistence that thought could never

attain reality, for as soon as it thought to have done so it falsified reality by having

changed it into imagined reality” (Jammer, 1966, p.173). Similarities between

Kierkegaard’s philosophy and Bohr’s interpretation of Quantum Mechanics can also

be found in Kierkegaard’s idea that traditional philosophy, “in its claim to being

capable of explaining everything, forgot that the originator of the system, however

important he [sic] may be, forms part of the being which is to be explained”. The

conclusion to be drawn from this is that:

3 See Holton, 1973, pp.137-140 for a fuller discussion. 4 See Jammer, 1966, pp.172-74 and Holton, 1973, pp.142-44 for a fuller discussion.

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Man [sic] cannot without falsification conceive of himself as an impartial spectator or impersonal observer; he always necessarily remains a participant. Thus man’s delimitation between the objective and the subjective is always an arbitrary act and man’s life a series of decisions (Jammer, 1966, p.173).

One of the main features of ‘qualitative dialectic’ is “an acceptance of thesis and

antithesis, without proceeding to another stage at which the tension is resolved in a

synthesis. Thus Kierkegaard draws a line between thought and reality which must not

be allowed to disappear” (Holton, 1973, p.146). Writing on this ‘tension’

Kierkegaard came “to regard the capability of embracing great contrasts and of

enduring the suffering which this involves as the criterion of the sublimity and value

of a conception of life” (Høffding, 1955, pp.288-89). For Kierkegaard then

“discontinuity between incompatibles” characterises his conception of life and he

advocated that the path of the individual is tracked by the subjective ‘leaps’ they

make between these incompatibles:

In Kierkegaard’s ethics the qualitative dialectic appears partly in his conception of choice, of the decision of the will, partly in his doctrine of stages. He emphatically denies that there is any analogy between spiritual and organic development. No gradual development takes place within the spiritual sphere, such as might explain the transition from deliberation to decision, or from one conception of life (or “stadium”) to another. Continuity would be broken in every such transition. As regards the choice, psychology is only able to point out possibilities and approximations, motives and preparations. The choice itself comes with a jerk, with a leap, in which something quite new (a new quality) is posited. Only in the world of possibilities is there continuity; in the world of reality decision always comes through a breach of continuity. But, it might be asked, cannot this jerk or this leap itself be made an object of psychological observation? Kierkegaard’s answer is not clear. He explains that the leap takes place between two moments, between two states, one of which is the last state in the world of possibilities, the other the first state in the world of reality. It would almost seem to follow from this that the leap itself cannot be observed. But then it would also follow that it takes place unconsciously-and the possibility of the unconscious continuity underlying conscious antithesis is not excluded (Høffding, 1955, pp.287-88).

Kierkegaard’s ‘qualitative dialectic’ resembles both Complementarity, in that it

upholds the possibility of opposing conclusions being used to give a full explanation,

and the Uncertainty Principle, in that it allows for resolution “in the opposition

between thought and being to come only by human interaction, as an act of choice”.

Likewise, Kierkegaard’s concept of free choice or the ‘leap’ resembles Bohr’s

description of physical existence at the sub-atomic level, designated as “quantum

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jumps leading to probabilistic causality”, which in turn lead to “a leap in

understanding from classical physics and its extension into relativity, to quantum

theory-a radical new frame of intelligibility” (Loder and Neidhardt, 1996, p.285).

Contained within Kierkegaard’s ‘leaps’ and James’ ‘flights’ is a way of thinking

about reflective practice. In The Physics Project the creative work (the making) was

the ‘flight’, while the reflections on the work (the thinking) was the ‘perching.’

These resting places where we may “feel that we have reached a certain harmony

between our mental picture of the world and our experience of it” (Rosenfeld, 1963,

p.49) before flying off again are the places of reflection that occurred along the way

and the landing places which have manifested in the project’s wake. These

‘perchings’ are the substance of this exegesis, while the ‘flight’ was the process of

creating and performing The Physics Project.

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Chapter Three: ‘Flights’ And ‘Perchings’ – Aesthetic and Theoretical Principles at Work in The Physics

Project

“He doesn’t help you think but he helps you because you have to think for him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapse. But with him (it? her?) [the computer] your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter” (Eco, 1990, pp.24-25).

Introduction

Chapter Three takes form as a close analysis of the thinking behind, and the making

of, The Physics Project. In it I will be specifically responding to my first research

questions: How can the principles of contemporary physics be reframed as aesthetic

principles for the creation of contemporary performance? I have broken the chapter

into two major sections that correspond to the two major forms of generative work I

completed for the project: writing and directing. ‘Writing’ integrates the five-year

writing process shared between Amantha May and I with the theoretical reading I

was doing during this period. It includes dimensions of both content and form – i.e.,

what we wrote about and what technology we ‘wrote’ into the piece in order to

deliver that content. ‘Directing’ details the collaborative work I undertook with

performers, designers and technicians. It describes the process of transferring the

work from the written to the performed state. In the description I have triangulated

the development of my own thinking with references from the actors’ journals and

essays that they wrote on their experiences in the project. I also discuss some of the

implications (theoretical and practical) of integrating live with mediated performance

modalities. The ‘Writing’ section will be divided into the following categories:

Process, Content and Form; Self and Other, Individual Mind and Universal Mind;

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Multiple Identities; The Nonmatrixed Body; Presence and Identity in Live and

Mediated Performance and; Technology as Prosthesis. Within the latter section the

sub-categories of; Space; Time; Light and; Complementarity will be used to focus in

on how these elements of content overlapped with the technological forms that were

employed in The Physics Project. The ‘Directing’ section will be divided into: The

Moving Body; Directing Live and Mediated Performances; Actors as Observer-

Participants; The Open-Ended Body; Mediated Actors and; The Mediated Actor as

Observer-Participant.

Part One: Writing – Process, Content and Form

In 1989 the physicist John Bell (quoted by Wick, 1995, p.viii) “charged that

physicists had divided the world into two realms – a ‘classical’ one and a ‘quantum’

one – with no intention of explaining what happens at the boundary between them”.

The Physics Project is a type of excavation at just such a border: it took place in a

liminal space between objectivity and subjectivity, between fact and fiction, and it

attempted to hold in place, without overtly reconciling, a series of traditional binary

oppositions: the division between the fields of art and science, self and other,

individual mind and universal mind, the live body and the digital body, the

intellectual and the visceral. The notion of Complementarity offered a grounding

metaphor for staging these relationships. As Marshall McLuhan (1967, p.10) wrote:

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories – for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.

In the ‘writing’ of The Physics Project the old categories of process, content and

form became blurred as each overlapped and influenced the other.

Self and Other, Individual Mind and Universal Mind

One of the major narrative preoccupations of The Physics Project – one that took on

increasing importance as the project developed – was an examination of the ways in

which individuals are actively involved in their own processes of identity

construction. Just as Wertheim (see Chapter One, p.7) advocated using physics as

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one way of understanding the world, my interest in metanarratives is to do with how

an individual latches on to those stories that are bigger than they as a way of re-

framing a sense of self. Be it religion or psychology or fairytales or myth,

metanarratives are the ways in which it becomes possible to ‘know’ yourself.

P.L. Travers says as much when discussing the connections between myth, fairytale

and spirituality:

… everybody, every religion, every tradition takes the myths and tries to bend them to its purpose … [T]he myths and fairy tales have not one sole meaning; they have, quite simply, meaning. They are like the diamond in the prince’s cap in the fairy tale. Turn it any way you like, this direction or the other, and it throws a new light on the hero. So, there is a meaning for me, there is a meaning for you, there is a meaning for everybody else. A true symbol always has this multi-sidedness. It doesn’t mean this or that, specifically, but it has meaning for all who approach it (Travers, 1970, p.5).

For Travers, the way to approach myths and to understand them, comes from

inverting the word ‘understand’ so that it becomes the phrase ‘stand under’: “I stand

under something and let it rain its truth upon me” (Travers, 1970, p.6). Such a poetic

was at the crux of The Physics Project: a sense of surrendering to all that is there, the

known and the unknown in the expectation that such surrender is the catalyst for

change.

Einstein gave us a hint of this when he said, ‘There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws – there is only the way of intuition.’… And there’s a Danish scientist-poet called Piet Hein … who said, explaining one of his technological inventions, ‘You must know the field and you must have the right spiral hole from your soul into the infinite. When you have that, new things emerge from the unconscious’ (Travers, 1970, pp.5-6).

In dramaturgical terms, the ‘Australian Woman’ in The Uncertainty Principle was a

representation of this philosophy. She initially upheld a version of Bettelheim’s

(1967, p.84) cosmic law of autism (see Chapter Two, p.35) which holds “you must

never hope that anything can change”, but she experiences an epiphany when, in

conversation with her projected ‘self’, she watches the moon tearing a hole in the

sky. Her projected ‘self’ offers her the inverse perspective that perhaps the sky is

47

releasing the moon (May and Mercer, 2006, p.19), (Appendix Three, p.149). As

Travers wrote:

[I]t is my idea that the condition of lunacy is one not to be despised, but rather aimed at … Why not a moth that mends holes? Or a snake that gives a healing bite? Why not a cuckoo that makes serviceable nests for other birds to lay their eggs in? Well, it’s a laughing matter, but not to be laughingly dismissed. For by thinking in this way, upside down, we might find out how to look at the myths with that lunatic eye, the eye that sees a world in a grain of sand (Travers, 1970, p.6)

In this moment the ‘Australian Woman’ recognises the part that perspective plays in

the construction of identity and in the possibility of its fluidity.

Multiple Identities

The Physics Project sought to investigate the idea that identity is only ever in a state

of flux; that identity is change or, to put it another way, that identity might take form

as a quantum pairing of stasis and change. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (1993, p.1)

maintains that we are evolving a “fluid and many-sided” self “appropriate to the

restlessness and flux of our time”. This self, which Lifton dubs “the ‘protean self’

after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms”, is capable “of fluid transformations

but is ground in coherence and a moral outlook. It is, we might say, both multiple

and integrated. You can have a sense of self without being one self” (Turkle, 1996,

p.258).

French feminist writers and philosophers Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous were

conceptually influential in the writing process of The Physics Project and their

connections with flux and identity are clear. In “This Sex Which is Not One”,

Irigaray (1981, p.101) replaces Freud’s classic binary representation of sexuality

with a paradigm of female multiplicity. She argues that “[w]oman’s desire most

likely does not speak the same language as man’s desire, and it probably has been

covered over by the logic that has dominated the West since the Greeks.”

Furthermore she says “in a culture that claims to enumerate everything, cipher

everything by units, inventory everything by individualities. She is neither one nor

two”.

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I attempted to voice this notion theatrically by having the ‘Australian Woman’

appear in two places at once, live and mediated, and through that interaction, reflect

the possibility of dual (and more) simultaneous paths. The ‘Narrator’ was similarly

conceived as having multiple identities. In the list of characters she is described as:

an older version of the Australian Woman, her future calling her forward. When she appears in Life as Light it is as if she is Miranda’s mother had she still been alive (May and Mercer, 2006, p.1), (Appendix Three, p.132).

Thus she is designated with three identities: herself in the present; an older version of

the ‘Australian Woman’ and; an older version of the ‘Blonde Woman’ had she lived.

At other times in the script, a character may split into multiple forms as when

‘Miranda’s mother is represented in four ways: as the ‘Female Voice’ (sound only),

the ‘Blonde Woman’ (live actor) and as a ‘Jean Harlow’-esque apparition (video

only) all played by the same actor and finally as the ‘Narrator’ in The Uncertainty

Principle played by another actor. The script also required that more than one actor

play the same character. Although the ‘American Woman’ in The Uncertainty

Principle and ‘Miranda’ in Life as Light are the same character, they were played by

different actors, Amantha May and Hanna Wood respectively. All of these textual

approaches, were initiated without recourse to psychological realism, but rather in

the spirit of what Cixous (1994, p.xvi) calls “the mysteries of subjectivity”.

The Nonmatrixed Body

Michael Kirby (1995, p.31) uses the term “nonmatrixed performing” to discuss the

idea of performers playing themselves in Happenings. Allen Kaprow (1993, p.63)

defines a performance as a Happening when it cannot be totally choreographed:

“Happenings should be unrehearsed and performed by non-professionals, once only”.

Within these redefined parameters of what constitutes performance are the

beginnings of transdisciplinary practice. Philip Auslander in his keynote presentation

“Humanoid Boogie: Reflections on Robotic Performance” at the e-Performance and

Plug-ins conference at UNSW in 2005 described the nonmatrixed performer as one

who is more or less doing exactly what the director required, without the

involvement of any interpretation and so cannot be comparable to the choices made

by an actor. Auslander’s discussion of nonmatrixed performers introduces another

pair of opposites into the mix of The Physics Project: the co-habitation of the

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nonmatrixed mediatised performer and the live performer. In The Physics Project,

nonmatrixed performers were employed mostly in the video component. William

May, the ‘Two Little Girls’ and Amantha May were all playing versions of

themselves. Due to the constraints of technology and distance William and

Amantha’s ‘rehearsal’ was of a very different nature from the live performers. Rather

than an extended rehearsal period, I ‘directed’ Amantha via webcasting and Amantha

‘directed’ her father William in New York inasmuch as she filmed his contributions.

The effect of long-distance directing or of being directed by a different director from

the live performance was to accentuate the “other worldliness” of these characters.

Their performances were “not necessarily in the same emotional space as the ‘live’”,

making them seem “emotionally disconnected to what’s going on in the live space”

(Appendix One, p.112). This served the work’s thematic preoccupation with isolation

by embodying the awkwardness of literal and emotional disconnection.

The nonmatrixed performers existed on the boundary of fact and fiction, of real

versus imagined identities. Through them the already autobiographical elements of

script were ‘enlivened’, for example when Amantha May (the co-writer) also

performed as the ‘American Woman’ and her father, William May as ‘Miranda’s’

father. Amantha May spoke lines I had written about the death of her mother,

William May improvised text around a framework provided by his daughter that

referenced his own wife and experiences in Mexico and images of Amantha’s mother

and father were included in the travelling slides of Miranda’s mother. I also placed

myself in the media, as one of many voices in the counting voice and as a figure in

the ‘Australian Woman’s’ timelapse sequence. In these cases ‘acting’ roles drew

substantially from real rather than created identities, insomuch as identity is the result

of our experiences and memories. In his seminal work on television, Raymond

Williams (1974, p.57) identifies the way in which “the exploring ‘eye of the

camera’” has “the feel for everyday ordinary life” and how since the 1950s this has

been exploited in televisual production. This work has been taken up and adapted by

Schechner (2002, p.35) who identifies how “first the avant-garde and later the media

and the internet” sabotaged the distinction between “make-believe” (performing on

stage or in a film – pretending) and “make-belief” (the performance of everyday life

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- being). According to Schechner’s more encompassing definition of performance,

“the social and personal world enacted” by actors and characters has become blurred.

In The Physics Project, the ‘American Woman’ and the ‘Father’ (who only ever

appeared via technology) and some segments of the ‘Australian Woman’ were

recorded in the actors’ own homes. And Amantha May (‘American Woman’) and

Erica Field (‘Australian Woman’) created ‘real life’ cyber identities in order to

manufacture and record the ‘web-cast’ chat. Here, in a nexus between everyday life

and make-believe, opposites blurred and existed in a complementary relationship.

Those who work with Lepage have described the interaction between the life of his

collaborators and the work they create, thus:

… intimate life seeps onto the stage, organization and logistics are inseparable from creation. Just as form is inseparable from content, different cultures and national identities constantly mesh together, while paradoxical links between chaos and creation or freedom and slavery seem quite fundamental (Charest, 1998, p.11).

Because the distinction between nonmatrixed and matrixed performing is often

blurred, Kirby (1995, p.7) identifies a “complete continuum” between “the clearly

nonmatrixed” and “the absolutely matrixed”. Such a continuum is an apt description

of how the nonmatrixed and matrixed performers operated in The Physics Project

and clearly equates with Bohr’s notion of Complementarity inasmuch as it draws

attention to the apparatus in which the performers exist and it allows for the

possibility of seemingly oppositional performing states to co-exist in the one

performance.

Presence and Identity in Live and Mediatised Performance

In his article “Does Death Survive? A Reverse Teleology”, a deliberation on the

theories of artist-architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Jost Muxfeldt

(2003, p.149) employs Jacques Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena to explain how

identity “only seems certain at the ‘present’ moment” and how self-presence is tied

to the self’s death. Here he cites Derrida:

If the possibility of my disappearance in general must somehow be experienced in order for a relationship with presence in general to be

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instituted, we can no longer say that the experience of the possibility of my absolute disappearance (my death) affects me, occurs to an I am, and modifies a subject. The I am, being experienced only as an I am present, itself presupposes the relationship with presence in general, with being as presence. The appearing of the I to itself in the I am is thus originally a relationship with its own possible disappearance. Therefore, I am originally means I am mortal. I am immortal is an impossible proposition. We can go even further: as a linguistic statement I am he who am is the admission of a mortal” (Derrida, 1973, p.54).

For Muxfeldt (2003, p.148) identity means “having no limits, means extending

identity potentially to everything at any time, and thus not to have a distinguishable

identity.” Thus death is “more fundamentally my limited condition, the horizon of

my existence” that which “[is] necessary for individuation” (Muxfeldt, 2003, p.149).

The notion that self-presence leads to death is one with significant ramifications for

the notion of ‘presence’ in a mediated performance environment.

In his 1997 conference paper “Ontology vs. History: Making Distinctions Between

the Live and the Mediatized”, Auslander identifies those who valorise the live over

the mediated. For example, Peggy Phelan has described performance as that which

honours the idea that “a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can

have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward” (Phelan, 1993,

p.149) and Patrice Pavis contends that if “theatre relationships are to take place”,

theatre “cannot tolerate more than a limited number of spectators” (Pavis, 1992,

p.101). Auslander concludes from writings such as these that "live performance is

identified with intimacy and disappearance” and that media is defined in opposition

as that which has “a mass audience” through “reproduction, and repetition”

(Auslander, 1997, p.1).

Auslander’s stated intention to destabilise the theoretical opposition of the live and

the mediatised is based on his assertion that both live and mediated performance:

are predicated on disappearance: just as performance itself is change, since no two are ever the same, the televisual image is produced by an ongoing process in which scan lines replace one another and is always as absent as it is present; the use of recordings causes them to degenerate. In a very literal, material sense, televisual and other technical reproductions, like live performances, become themselves through disappearance (Auslander, 1997, p.3).

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In addition to this proposition Auslander argues that the advent of the technologies of

sound recording and motion pictures brought with them the advent of the live

performance, thus the category of ‘live’ only has meaning “in relation to an opposing

possibility.” He goes so far as to say that the ancient Greek theatre “was not live

because there was no possibility of recording it”. For Auslander, the ‘live’ can only

be defined as “that which can be recorded.” Accordingly, “the historical relationship

of liveness and mediatization must be seen as a relation of dependence and

imbrication rather than opposition” (Auslander, 1997, p.4).

One conclusion drawn from the Magdalena version of The Physics Project was that

the “mediated performer needs to function differently from the live actor” (Appendix

One, p.90) Adding these conclusions to Auslander’s meant no longer placing the

mediated performances in the project in opposition to their live counterparts, but

looking for the “common ground and shared vision which might enable media to re-

energize live performance" (Loveless, 1999, p.73). In essence, for the Loft version of

The Physics Project I sought a performance practice that integrated ‘liveness’ and

‘media’, one that was:

neither media nor performance, but is a mediation, or a performance happening which takes place in both real and asynchronous time, and which engages with both lived experience and imagined visions, creating images and offering connections to the respective audiences, which might be described as a new kind of presence (Loveless, 1999, p.77).

Technology as Prosthesis

In Understanding Media, McLuhan (1994, p.13) not only made the famous argument

that the “medium is the message”, but also that media are ‘extensions’ of our human

senses, bodies and minds and “that the ‘content’ of any medium is always another

medium” (McLuhan, 1994, p.8). For McLuhan the advent of electric technology

generated the extensions of our central nervous system “in a global embrace,

abolishing both space and time” signalling “the final phase of the extensions of man

[sic] – the technological simulation of consciousness” (McLuhan, 1994, p.3). In an

observation that seemed to prophesise the internet he claimed that the new

“electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village”

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(McLuhan, 1962, p.31). Contemporary performance artist Stelarc takes this idea of

prosthetic extension further to “explore an emerging posthuman culture in which the

human body is becoming obsolete in its untouched state” (Wamberg, 2005, p.69):

The body has always been a kind of prosthetic body coupled to its technology. And technology has proliferated in the human horizon. But with its increasing microminiaturization and with more and more biocompatible materials, technology cannot only be attached to the body but can also be implanted. Technology doesn’t contain the body so much as become a component of the body (Stelarc and Smith, 2005, p.232).

In her consideration of “the capacity of natural and cultural organisms to adapt

extrinsic objects, things, into their bodily operations through prosthetic

incorporation”, Elizabeth Grosz (2005, p.9) defines two types of prosthesis – “one

which accommodates existing needs” and “another which introduces new aesthetic

and practical possibilities not yet available.” She asks if “architecture, clothing, food,

our use of the materials and objects around us” extends what we have or transforms

us into what we cannot yet know. She concludes with an ambiguity, namely that

prostheses “both augment and generate” (Grosz, 2005, p.152). This ambiguity,

recalling as it does the model of Complementarity, is closer to the notion of

prosthesis as it was employed in The Physics Project. Rather than Stelarc’s interest

in the obsolescence of the human body, prosthesis in The Physics Project operated to

extend the body, but in the process to humanise the technology.

After the Magdelana showing, it became clear that the dramaturgical functions of the

‘live’ characters needed to be extended through the reach of the characters delivered

in mediated form. This was manifested in a number of ways in the Loft version. For

example, in her opening monologue ‘Miranda’ wields technology to expand her

version of herself. She does this by seeming to ‘conduct’ and control the projected

images that are silhouetting her, moving from the images of “the 39th Mersenne

Prime Number” through the “[m]urkily beautiful orange and red colors [sic]” and

into the starfield (May and Mercer, 2006, pp.4-5), (Appendix Three, p.136). In so

doing, ‘Miranda’s’ interactions with technology inform what she’s saying rather than

overwhelm her. Here, the literal prosthetic implications of technology e.g., a

prosthetic limb that enables you to reach beyond your previous limitations, were

extended to the aesthetic realm. The inherent philosophical and spiritual implications

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of this application have a long history.5 Their application in performance extended

the dimensions of the work, particularly in relation to the central exploration of

personal identity.

For Lifton (1993, p.230) calling forth the protean self is “part of seizing upon the

evolutionary human capacity to connect with faraway places”. While Lifton does not

refer to technology or physics specifically, he notes that the process of locating the

self “outside of its immediate setting” took “a quantum leap” in the twentieth century

as our access to distant locations radically expanded:

We modify the self to include connections virtually anywhere while clinging to a measure of coherence. The individual self thus learns to develop a ‘place for many places,’ while the prevailing historical forces propel the process toward ever greater inclusiveness (Lifton, 1993, p.230).

When Lifton concludes that the “multilocal self can draw images from far places and

render them its own ‘memories’” (1993, p.230) and that “the human community has

been radically broadened” (Lifton, 1993, p.232), he parallels the writing of Cixous

who writes:

Our own subjective singularities are in truth composed, on the one hand, of many other near or distant humans, we are carriers of previous generations, we are, without knowing it, heirs, caretakers, witnesses of known or unknown ancestors; on the other hand we are full of others originating from the books we have read (Cixous, 1994, p.xx).

Here we have the essence of the ‘Narrator’ and the philosophical position towards

which the ‘Australian Woman’ and ‘Miranda’, the dual protagonists, move over the

dramatic arc of the work. Their fictional journeys were also a reflection of the artistic

processes involved in their generation. The maintenance and momentum of an

artistic collaboration that Amantha and I had built up over three years of work at the

California Institute of the Arts and beyond. At some point in the process, this

imperative changed from an external operating principle (technology as

communication device) to an internal aesthetic one. The application of technology to

performance became one of the foci of the piece itself.

5 See, for example, the lines by poet Robert Browning (1974, p.346) in Andrea del Sarto: “Ah, but a man’s [sic] reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a Heaven for?” Or the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson (19-?, p.151) who in 1870 wrote: “The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses”.

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In The Physics Project, live actors interacted with: digital bodies; recorded voice;

chat text; projected text; web-cast characters; light; video and; microphones. In the

degree to which it saturated the performance, the status of technology went well

beyond the functional and was a major narrative element of the performance. I

consider this use of performance technology as prosthetic, in that it extends the reach

of the performance through time and space allowing performers in different time

zones and spaces to interact with each other.

One feature of the operation of certain technologies is that they allow for multiple

spaces and times to co-exist. In The Physics Project characters negotiated with

versions of themselves or with other characters who inhabited the past, present and

the future. I will now address a further overlap between content and form that

occurred in each of the four areas of physics under consideration – space, time, light

and Complementarity.

Space

Space, for example, was re-formed in multiple fictive modes – the live, the mediated,

the web-cast and the videoed spaces (including city streets and actors’ houses). At

the conclusion of the Magdalena showing, Brisbane-based media artist Keith

Armstrong raised the question: “What’s the aesthetic of web-cast authenticity that

video can’t give?” (Appendix One, p.89). The answer, it seemed, was that the

pixellated quality of the web-cast images evoked distance in a way the clear video

images didn’t. This became one of the future principles guiding our choices

regarding the use of web-casting technology. Schechner (2002, p.41) describes web-

casting as allowing everyday actions to be performed on the stage because the

performers ‘do’ the action “itself in front of our very eyes”. This was also the case in

The Physics Project, as the ‘American Woman’ (Amantha May) and Miranda’s

father (William May) were ‘web-cast’ from their apartments in the United States.6

6 This everyday performance of Amantha May and William May sitting in their apartments was enabled by the performance of highly virtuosic technology, but it should be noted that when this technology only sometimes worked in rehearsals, I decided it was too unreliable for the delivery of vital content and so in the actual performances pixellated video footage of these encounters was used instead. Accordingly I am analyzing the intention and the rehearsal experience of the web-casting rather than the actual experience of the performance.

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The space of the everyday was also introduced via the video sequences which were

all filmed in ‘real-life’ locations, homes or on the street. They included: a segment

filmed in Brisbane’s city streets; a time-lapse sequence recorded in Erica Field’s

bedroom; and the ‘Two Little Girls’ playing in a park. Video was not only used to

bring other spaces into the space the performer shared with the audience, but it was

also deployed to bring the audience into what was inside the performer: the internal,

emotional space. Similar to what Lepage describes, in the 1998 documentary Les 7

paroles de Robert Lepage, as “using technology to peer into the soul”. The actor who

played Miranda’s mother, Emily Thomas (2006a, p.9) identifies the ability of

mediated devices to “magnify and amplify the most intimate physical and verbal

details of the actor’s performance”, via zoom functions on cameras and microphones.

In his review of The Physics Project in Real Time, Stephen Carleton (2006, p.2) taps

into the conventional perception of technology as “impersonal” and “dehumanising”

and yet concludes that in the case of this work it is “surprisingly touching”; a clear

outcome of Complementarity hidden in a complimentary fashion.

In some cases space seemed only to exist in a state of deconstruction. The scene in

which the ‘Narrator’ appeared to change the final word in the DaVinci quote from

‘plight’ to ‘light’ and then the word into light itself sought to transcend the barrier

between the live and the mediated, to illustrate that “distinctions of here and there no

longer mean anything” (Virilio, 1991, p.13):

MIRANDA: I must be living at light speed, one point in space is not favored over another, I’m here and then I’m there and then here again. Where was I? (May and Mercer, 2006, p.30), (Appendix Three, p.160).

Space is also specifically addressed in the first scenes of each of the entwined

narratives in The Physics Project. Scene one, Space, of The Uncertainty Principle

(my story), opens with the ‘Australian Woman’ “on a platform of absolute rest”, her

figure “vertically intersects with the horizon, creating a right angle.” Here, in her

state of absolute physical and emotional stillness she is under the impression that she

is in control: “she alone holds all the stars up in the sky”. When she disrupts this

stasis by reaching towards the horizon, grabbing hold and trying to walk along it –

tight-rope-walker style – she falls from her platform of absolute rest and so begins

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her journey towards seeking connection with others (May and Mercer, 2006, p.2),

(Appendix Three, p.133). The use of the concept of absolute rest comes from the

Galilean (or inertial) frames of reference which support the existence of “a stationary

locus in space: a universal Ground Zero, if you will, that did not move” and from

which everything else may be measured. During the Renaissance this theory was

embraced so completely “it became new a priori knowledge” (Shlain, 1991, p.61).

According to Newton the best place to measure the speed of light was from the

position of absolute rest provided by the ether. By “declaring that space and time are

relative and only the speed of light is constant”, Einstein debunked Newton’s theory

(Shlain, 1991, p.121). Similarly the notion that the horizon is a straight line was

debunked by the discovery of “curved spacetime” so that the horizon, which appears,

straight, is actually curved (Shlain, 1991, p.106). Thus, in physics, space was

reconfigured and for the ‘Australian Woman’ the space that represents her is

similarly reworked over the course of the narrative. Scene one of Life as Light

(Amantha’s story), The Counting or Colorful [sic] Memories, also establishes the

space inhabited by the character ‘Miranda’, the physical space of her body in

silhouette and the narrative space of her search for a pattern in her work and in her

memories of her mother.

Time

Einstein’s conjectures about the behaviour of space-time at the speed of light enabled

Shlain (1991, p.123) to speculate that at the speed of light the present would

incorporate “all of the past and all of the future so that all time exists in one still

moment of now” (quoted by May and Mercer, 2006, p.11), (Appendix Three, p.141).

In The Physics Project this theory was evoked through the use of pre-recorded (and

originally web-cast) images that fracture the present-time of the theatre performance

and enable multiple times and spaces to exist. The fictive past-in-present was also

invoked when the Makech (the beetle as jewellery that ‘Gabriel’ gives the ‘Blonde

Woman’ as a present) was ‘handed’ from the web-cast/video-‘Father’ in the

present/past to the actor ‘Miranda’ in the present. The implication was that time and,

the Makech, an apparently solid object, have malleable form.

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The second scene of The Uncertainty Principle, entitled Time, deals explicitly with

the notion of time as the ‘Australian Woman’ articulates her conception of it in

relation to the death of her best friend. The ‘Narrator’ introduces other concepts of

time, including “a Chinese story of time”, “the story of the Red Queen” and

“Einstein’s story of time” (May and Mercer, 2006, pp.9-11), (Appendix Three,

pp.140-41) to activate the ‘Australian Woman’ out of her stasis and propel her into

action. In scene two of Life as Light, entitled The Ancestry of Time or the Natural

Flow of Place, ‘Miranda’ summons up the physical form of her long-dead mother,

depicted in a time even further in the past before she was even born. This, and the

video of a marionette that seems “to warp into light speed” (May and Mercer, 2006,

p.16), (Appendix Three, p.147) creates a mise-en-scène in which notions of time are

up for grabs and in which the relationship between time and memory is central.

Light

Light was explored through the embodiment of ‘Miranda’ (a silhouette interacting

with light and projection), and the actions of ‘Jean Harlow’, the ‘Father’, the

‘American Woman’, and the ‘Two Little Girls’ who were all conjured by light in the

form of projected images. As the actor portraying the ‘Female Voice/Blonde

Woman/Jean Harlow’ character, Emily Thomas (2006a, p.7), wrote in her journal,

her character(s)’ desire was: “to defy’ time (memory), to simultaneously inhabit

many spaces (home/self), and to live as light (imagination/inspiration).” For Emily

projections of light “transformed the screens into a portal; a transportation device to

spaces (public, private and virtual) and times (notably the past) beyond the present in

the theatre”.

Light was also correlated with an exploration of imagination and inspiration. In the

Light scene of The Uncertainty Principle, Scene three, “random images of light”

depicting fragments of the ‘Australian Woman’s’ memories “recede until they each

become a star” (May and Mercer, 2006, p.16), (Appendix Three, p.147). These

sources of inspiration, as well as the Buddhist “story of light” (May and Mercer,

2006, p.19), (Appendix Three, p.150) afford the ‘Australian Woman’ a moment of

insight, that the present “is not universal and simultaneous, it is made up of ‘multiple

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different instants’”. This moment of insight emboldens the ‘Australian Woman’ and

so she “dips her toe into the ‘water’”, a sign that she will step out of what has been

trapping her (May and Mercer, 2006, p.20), (Appendix Three, p.150).

In Life as Light, Scene three, The Illumination of Illusion, ‘Miranda’ explores what

happens at the speed of light when “all moments in time become visible at once from

all possible angles” (May and Mercer, 2006, p.20), (Appendix Three, p.150) by

coming out from behind her screen for the first time and lighting ‘Gabriel’ and the

‘Blonde Woman’ with a lamp, essentially turning them into the shadows that up to

this moment she had been. From this vantage point and using light to turn them into

shadow puppets, ‘Miranda’ literally demonstrates how she has been manipulating her

Mother’s story. This scene focuses on the subjectivity of reality, which theories

relating to the speed of light point towards.

Complementarity

Complementarity was the overarching theme through which these multiple

representations of space, time and light operated. It suggested a framework beyond

an ‘either live / or mediated’ scenario. The three character manifestations of the

‘Blonde Woman/Female Voice/Jean Harlow’ are a good case in point. Emily

Thomas (2006a, p.8) suggested in her journal that her performance in this role/s

came to embody Complementarity since she was only ever complete across

mediums:

Alone, the Female Voice could not be seen, and, in isolation, the live Blonde Woman and Harlow video were muted apparitions. The presence of each form was required to ‘activate’ the other.

She concluded that in live/mediated performance “both the ‘out there’ and the ‘in

here’ existed simultaneously” and described her character and her performing self

existing “as a vibration between worlds”.

Complementarity was also evidenced in the concept of ‘elsewhere-ness’ in The

Uncertainty Principle and ‘in-betweeness’ in Life as Light. The ‘Australian Woman’

first encounters this as she looks out of an aeroplane window flying across the United

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States at night. Here she describes the lit cities below as “little countries of orange

light” and in-between these orange countries “an indistinguishable blackness, the

interruption of light, an absence of anything at all, until its very blackness becomes

something – another country” (May and Mercer, 2006, p.17), (Appendix Three,

p.147). The ‘Australian Woman’s’ burgeoning acknowledgement of the connection

between alternate perspectives echoes Gertrude Stein’s observations made in The

Geographical History of America, upon her first sight of an aerial landscape whilst

flying over the United States in 1934. Using the metaphor of the landscape, Stein

distinguishes between human nature which she associates with “memory, emotions,

history, identity” and human mind which she associates “with creation and with

writing” (Vanskike, 1993, p.160). For Stein the human mind is the flat land seen

from above and human nature is the land seen from the ground, unable “to transcend

a single viewpoint” (Rubery, 1998, p.1):

If Stein can achieve this state of always seeing flatness, she will have banished human nature, and she can exist in human mind alone, where she will not longer be in danger of being fixed by identity and in history (Vanskike, 1993, p.163).

While Stein may have a more oppositional intention in her observation – “to reject

experience for writing – to choose entity over identity, philosophy over science, and

finally, the human mind over human nature” (Ashton, 2002, p.337), the ‘Australian

Woman’ develops this insight by relating it to herself and in the process names it

‘elsewhere’:

AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: home again I have two lives one there one here and this space in-between, this elsewhere, is a third thing, the one true constant, constantly lost waiting to be found again (May and Mercer, 2006, p.18), (Appendix Three, p.148).

The ‘Narrator’ reinforces this epiphany in the story of every star that immediately

follows – “what is lost if never fully lost” (May and Mercer, 2006, p.18), (Appendix

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Three, p.148). It is also a part of the ‘Australian Woman’s’ final step in Scene four,

entitled Complementarity, taken towards a sense of wider community:

In this light, this gathered light, I watch us all driving and working and eating and talking and watching and sleeping and repeating, endlessly repeating and yet we are all elsewhere too, covered in darkness watching ourselves in the light, driving, working, eating, talking, watching, sleeping…my alone-ness and I (May and Mercer, 2006, p.23), (Appendix Three, p.153).

In Life as Light ‘Miranda’s’ notion of ‘in-betweeness’ relates to her description of

what it takes to grasp the truth of her memories:

I must look not only at her story but also between hers and hers-that-is-mine and his-that-is-hers and his-that-I-just-made-up (May and Mercer, 2006, p.20), (Appendix Three, p.150).

From here, ‘Miranda’ moves to her final position – a reconciliation of opposites in

Scene four My Complements to the Truth. She realises that because of the Makech

“the story is both real and not real. Because of the Makech the truth lies between

what’s real and what’s not real” (May and Mercer, 2006, p.26), (Appendix Three,

p.156). The ramifications of this is a new understanding of how she lives her life: “I

must be living at light speed, one point in space is not favored [sic] over another, I’m

here and then I’m there and then here again” (May and Mercer, 2006, p.30),

(Appendix Three, p.160); and a sense of clarity regarding her relationship with her

mother:

So you see, no matter where I go, I am her, and no matter what time it is, the memories play themselves over and over, and I get born again (May and Mercer, 2006, p.31), (Appendix Three, p.161).

Part Two: Directing

Process in the rehearsal room is a good example of interdependence. In addition to

the eclectic range of processes, techniques and performance modalities that shape my

artistic practice as a writer/director, the general trajectory in the rehearsal room of

The Physics Project was to begin with the external and work from the outside in,

using the actors’ bodies and physical expression as an introduction to the text. There

was a sense in which we were first looking for the overall shape and rhythms of the

piece. In the early stages of his rehearsals, American director Robert Wilson

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practices an extreme version of this thinking by ‘doing’ the movement separate from

the text. According to Wilson:

The movement must have a rhythm and structure of its own. It must not follow the text. It can reinforce the text without illustrating it. What you hear and what you see are two different layers. When you put them together, they create another texture…It may seem arbitrary at first, but later the different layers add up. There will be an architecture. Meanings will emerge. My way of working is not rational. I’m intuitive (quoted by Holmberg, 1996, p.136).

In Schechner’s (2002, p.28) eight kinds of performance, he distinguishes between

performance “in the arts” and performance “in everyday life”. In his discussion of

the work of French director Ariane Mnouchkine, which he describes as a series of

“theatrical metaphors”, Adrian Kiernander (1993, p.25) aligns her thinking on

performance alongside Eugenio Barba’s distinction “between the ‘daily behaviour’

of ordinary life and the ‘extra-daily behaviour which characterises performance”. For

Mnouchkine:

The theatre consists of metaphor, metaphor of gesture, metaphor of words, and what is wonderful in the theatre is when an actor transforms an emotion, a memory, a state or a passion. Passion in its pure state is not visible if the actor doesn’t transform it into a performance, that is, into a sign, into a gesture (Kiernander, 1993, p.25).

Mnouchkine uses the term ‘state’ or ‘état’ to describe “the metaphorical

transformation of daily life into theatre” and describes an actor as “a person who

finds a metaphor for an emotion”. This ‘state’ is in opposition to ‘psychological

theatre’ “where the actor’s tendency is to conceal strong emotion in order to make a

character look more ‘natural’”. For Mnouchkine’s work, remaining “in an everyday,

naturalistic, psychological register” is not an option (Kiernander, 1993, pp.25-26).

Working with actors in The Physics Project demanded working in what I will term

‘psychological’ and ‘physical’ registers, but could also be categorized as ‘internal’

and ‘external’. It required an interaction between these two states and processes, the

psychological and the physical and the ‘daily’ and ‘extra-daily’.

The Moving Body

Rehearsals began with a movement workshop led by physical theatre performer

Stace Callaghan, utilising Gabrielle Roth’s ‘Five Rhythms’ techniques. Beginning

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rehearsals this way was part of a strategy to instil in the cast that neither the text nor

the technology should be privileged over the physical presence of the live

performers. Despite the fact that the performance text is primarily monologue-based

and that they rarely (with the exception of the ‘Blonde Woman’ and ‘Gabriel’)

interact with other live actors, I sought to create a shared physical vocabulary

between the actors and a sense that physical separateness did not necessarily

constitute an absence of physical presence or movement or prioritise the intellectual

over the emotional.

Roth’s ‘Five Rhythms’ encourages performers to think with their bodies, to

externally solve internal issues with and between characters. This strategy and focus

in rehearsals generated long movement sequences for the ‘Australian Woman’ and

precisely choreographed interactions between the ‘Blonde Woman’ and ‘Gabriel’. In

my rehearsal journal, I noted that the moments when we felt stuck were “often

because we’ve been trying to find a naturalistic solution, whereas those moments

when solutions are found are often when we’re working from the outside in and/or

when we really work with what the technology is offering us” (Appendix One,

p.108). The following three examples illustrate this point: firstly, the moment when

we discovered that ‘Miranda’s’ silhouette and the ‘Blonde Woman’s’ silhouette

could interact. This occurred at the beginning of Life as Light Scene four when

‘Miranda’ ‘interacted’ with the crumpled silhouette of her mother on the floor, by

seeming to help her to stand. This moment gave the ‘Blonde Woman’ one of her few

moments of agency, when she picked up the discarded light and was able to reflect

and control her own shadow onto ‘Miranda’s’ screen and thus wave farewell to her

daughter. The second example came from those moments in rehearsal when we

allowed the video footage to operate as a character, and thirdly when we explored all

the possibilities of the revolving set to see how it could relate to the inner dimensions

of the characters, for example when the ‘Narrator’ rotated the box set during her

telling of Einstein’s story of time.

Hanna Wood (‘Miranda’) who spent the majority of the performance silhouetted

behind a screen described a requirement of the actors to move “beyond Stanislavski’s

methods of the psychological, internal motivations of the character and use technical

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practice” to develop techniques designed “to exteriorise emotion as actors

experimented with placing themselves in heightened physical positions which in turn

affected their oral delivery and emotion” (Wood, 2006, pp.2-3):

The performer is required to be constantly aware of her physical position in relation to the projection screen to avoid removing sections of her silhouette. The performer trained using strong, angular poses, upright posture and dynamic movement to heighten the sharpness of her mediated body (Wood, 2006, p.3).

In the case of ‘Miranda’, her mediated body “is affected by the vivid visual scapes

and sound scapes which surround her. The screen images transform from scenes of

the universe to a landscape of throbbing reds, yellows and oranges, coupled with a

flowing orchestral score. ‘Miranda’ becomes engaged in an intense dialogue with the

sounds and visual imagery around her and draws power from the representational

media” (Wood, 2006, p.6).

In another example, Erica Field as the ‘Australian Woman’ played the entire scene in

the aeroplane looking down at the lit cities of the United States, elevated above her

chair by pressing her arms into a full extension from the armrests. She remained in

this position until the climax of the scene “where there is both an emotional and

physical release” (Wood, 2006, p.3). This was a virtuosity in which the physical

results weren’t on view for the audience (since her body was in fact obscured from

the audience and all they could see was her face peering out through the window) but

where the physical virtuosity was working towards an emotional connection with the

audience. In addition, working with technology in rehearsals sometimes required the

performers to perfect purely technical manoeuvres. For example, the ‘Australian

Woman’s’ interaction with another digital version of herself required that the actor

rehearse the precise timing and rhythm of her prerecorded double as if it were a piece

of music, in order to create the illusion of an actual conversation between her live

and her mediated selves. This was also the case for ‘Miranda’ working with a pre-

recorded version of her ‘web-cast’ conversation with her father. The effort to make

this look as natural and ‘live’ as possible required the type of precision that can only

be created by extensive rehearsals.

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Directing Live and Mediated Performances

Research in the field of live and distributed performance is often framed by the

question: "What is 'live' about 'live performance'"? (Loveless, 1999, p.73). I sought

cohabitation rather than standoff in my use of these terms. When it comes to

wielding live and digital bodies, in both theory and practice, definition by opposition

is a recurring theme in much of the current research. The digital body is variously

described, either negatively as a "weightless shell" or positively as "structurally

unfettered, multiple and boundless in its imaginative/fantastic possibilities"

(Begusch, 1999, p.30). Live performances often draft the digital body as the 'other',

the 'empty', the 'skinless', 'unfeeling' or 'light', the 'illusory' or 'shadow', and then

relate their merely 'bodily' matter in metaphorical and real ways to the image of the

digital body" (Begusch, 1999, p. 32).

Much of this thinking is predicated on a type of mind/body split that I do not

advocate. Instead, since the “extension of the real through mediated representation

necessarily collapses the intellectual importance of certain binary oppositions,

irrational/rational, meaningful/meaninglessness, single/multiple personas”, I am

seeking a ‘presence’ that harnesses the cross-over between the live and the mediated

body, one that “undermines the importance of the rational/irrational ground of

psychological continuity in narrative performance" (Reilly-McVittie, 1999, p.95).

When discussing mediated vs. live performance, terms like: "Action at a distance"

vs. "meat space" (Reilly-McVittie, 1999, p.92) have been employed. The latter term,

is reductive in that it refers only to the physical presence of a performer, I don't

believe that the live performer is only physically live or that the performative world

(and thus the world) is represented only by ‘liveness’. I sought a performance style in

which the live and the mediated are in a complementary relationship that is matched

at the levels of both form and content.

Working with actors, shaping their interactions with various technologies, it became

necessary to consider how far the acting body has become a site of theoretical

contention. The fact that much technology allows us to “transcend what used to be

the natural limits imposed by the body” and that images of “artificial persons existing

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as bytes and bits of optical and aural messages,” are becoming increasingly familiar,

has meant that “the distinction between physical and digital reality seems to be

fading" (Bleeker, 1999, p.3). In her article “The Impossible Becomes Possible”,

Bojana Kunst provides four examples in which the biological body has been

demoted: performance artist Stelarc reduces it to “fractional meat”; Baudrillard talks

of “the end of the unique phenomenon called the body”; Paul Virilio describes it as

"invalid, prosthetic’, requiring more and more “high-tech prostheses” in order to

function; and Kunst herself states that "[c]ompared to computers with Internet

access, our bodies may indeed seem rather inadequate in their inability to cope, for

example, with high-speed voyages through virtual space where the body becomes

rigid and immovable, where eyes and spine suffer" (Kunst, 1999, p.47).

In an article for American Theatre entitled “The Future of the Body”, Steven

Druckman asks what the future holds for the live body in space “when both live-ness

and space are being re-defined?” In response to this question, Auslander says:

Although it's very important to consider the implications of new technologies for the performing body, it would be a mistake to address these issues in terms of a strict dichotomy between the live body and the technologized body. We must keep in mind that the live body is – and always has been – itself the product of technologies of representation (quoted by Druckman, 1999, p.20).

My perception of ‘the body’ going into the writing and rehearsing of The Physics

Project was of wanting to explore and represent the body as contiguous with the

mind, as equally live and mediated. During rehearsals the actors made their own

discoveries along these lines. Erica Field (2006, p.8) described a “vibration” between

herself as a performer and her “represented, and mediated, self as the character”. For

Emily Thomas the movement came from the tendency in rehearsals to employ both

external (i.e., physical theatre techniques) and internal (psychological realism) modes

of performance and to in fact move “back and forth between the two simultaneously”

(Thomas, 2006a, p.3).

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Actors as Observer-Participants

Auslander’s (1995, pp.307-8) article on the actor Willem Dafoe provides a useful

language with which to frame these observations. Dafoe foregrounds performance as

“manifestations of a single performing persona”. For him then, the distinctions

between characters are merely the result of “different action[s]”: “performance is

essentially a task, an activity: the persona he creates is the product of his own

relation to the ‘paces’ he puts himself through”. Dafoe evokes this material when he

describes the performance state thus:

While unconscious of the audience, he is hyper-conscious of creating a public image. The multiple, divided consciousness produced by doing something with the knowledge that it is being observed, while simultaneously observing oneself doing it, yield a complex confrontation with self (Auslander, 1995, p.307).

Here then is the Uncertainty Principle in operation: awareness of the acting apparatus

affecting the outcome. As Dafoe describes it: “There’s a double thing happening. I’m

saying the text, but I’m always wondering what my relationship to the text is”

(Auslander, 1995, pp.308-9). This “consciousness of the whole situation” means that

“persona, distance, audience perception of the performer, the performer’s perception

of himself – are always part of” Dafoe’s performance and part of the subject of his

performance. He operates on the assumption that “the performers’ personae are

produced by the process as much as the process is produced by the performers”

(Auslander, 1995, p.310). Dafoe and Auslander take this further:

‘Task and vision, vision in the form of a task;’ the work’s vision is the task as performed by a certain group of people, and the task is a vision of what the performance should be and what those people can do. Within this circular [or perhaps, complementary] system, the performer’s persona is at once his presentation of self to the audience and his image of himself performing. There is a certain frankness to the approach; the performer’s image is generated by the activity of the moment, by what the audience sees him doing under the immediate circumstances. Task/vision, vision/task; ‘The perfection of a persona is a noble way to go’ (Auslander, 1995, p.310).

This seems particularly reminiscent of Bohr’s preoccupations with the use of

language and how it related to experience. The physicist D.S. Kothari (1985, pp.326-

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27) draws attention to this when he discusses the difficulty that arises “from the

inescapable fact that man is both actor and spectator in the universe. Thus, when I

am ‘seeing’ a thing, I am also ‘acting’: my choice to see the particular thing is an

‘act’ on my part. We often use the same word to describe both a state of

consciousness and the associated accompanying behaviour of the body.” Similarly,

we may say that the different meanings of the same word belong to different ‘planes

of objectivity’ (Kothari, 1985, p.327). The central notion that ‘the performer’s

persona is at once their presentation of self to the audience and their image of

themself performing’ is at the core of why the director calls on the both

‘external/physical’ and ‘internal/psychological’ modes of performance. Even Robert

Wilson has been known to introduce Stanislavskyan terms into a rehearsal process

alongside otherwise quite technical requests of his actors, for example numbered

moves in conjunction with words or the execution of “physical gestures that were

unrelated to text” (Halperin-Royer, 2002, p.330).

The idea of the actor as both an observer and a participant in the action was extended

in The Physics Project beyond the performance makers out to the audience

themselves. They, who, in accordance with Eco’s notion of ‘the open work’, were

seen as equal contributors/participants in the making of the work. In “a radical shift

in the relationship between artist and public” that requires “of the public a much

greater degree of collaboration and personal involvement” (Robey, 1989, pp.x-xi), I

relinquished the expectation that the audience would ‘understand’ all the threads of

the stories in a linear sense (although a linear story was available within the structure

of the narrative). Instead, I saw the audience and the actors as both just being present

in the moments created by the work, and so open to the layers of possible

associations on display.

The Open-Ended Body

According to Dafoe (quoted by Auslander, 1995, pp.309-10), a consequence of being

a participant-observer to his own process is that rather than closing down, or

presenting a finished character, he is more likely to be ‘feeling his way through’,

leaving it “open-ended”. This is a very useful way to describe the work of the live

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performer in a highly mediated space. As the connections between the live and the

mediated increase, so too do the possible associations for the actors and possible cues

for the technicians. The performers and the work itself open up rather than become

fixed and closed.

In a discussion of Lepage’s work seeking to account for how he organises meaning,

Shawn Huffman (2000, p.168) identifies Lepage’s technique of exploring the

multiple manifestations of meaning “as they present themselves during the course of

the creative process”. In this way, according to Huffman (2000, p.156) Lepage

operates according to a “rhizomatic principle”. Huffman also uses this relationship

between Lepage and ‘meaning’ to account for why Lepage often describes his plays

as ‘works in progress.’ “Thus underscoring the exploratory nature of his rhizomatic

technique” (Huffman, p.168).

The image of the ‘rhizome’, a term from botany which refers to a horizontal

subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes comes from

the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator, French

psychotherapist Felix Guattari, who offered it as a way of considering the

relationship between a book and the world. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.12)

the rhizome, like a map, “is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact

with the real” and towards fostering “connections between fields”. Thus, “the book is

not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world” (Deleuze and Guattari,

1987, p.11). Two of the principle characteristics of a rhizome are particularly

relevant to The Physics Project. Firstly that it “connects any point to any other point,

and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature” and secondly that

it “has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows

and which it overspills” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.21). In The Physics Project

these characteristics relate both to the process of working and the working project

that was presented to an audience. In both cases the project aimed to open up

multiple associations in the artist/participants and the audience/participants.

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Three examples from the artist/participants involved in The Physics Project speak to

this. One of the results of my collaboration with designer Kieran Swann was the

decision to retain the sense of the theatre space. No attempt was made to transform it

into anything but what it clearly is – a theatre. The design, is sparse, projectable, the

technicians visible as they move the ‘Australian Woman’s’ revolving box. This

acknowledgement of the mechanics of the theatre space is also evident in Life as

Light – Scene 3: The Illumination of Illusion when ‘Miranda’ operates a working

light, with assistance from a stage hand, to transform the flesh and blood performers

playing the ‘Blonde Woman’ and ‘Gabriel’ into shadows. Hanna Wood (2006, p.16)

says that by “deliberately presenting the scaffolding of the performance”, The

Physics Project informs the audience “of the layers involved in its creation. Amongst

the designers there was a third example of the ‘overspill’ of connections. The

incidental sound and voice recorded during the filming of the ‘Two Little Girls’

sequence by video artist Conan Fitzpatrick ended up forming a vital element of the

composer, Robert D. Clark’s, soundscape.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.21) a rhizome is “made of plateaus”, “always in

the middle, not at the beginning or the end”. They cite Gregory Bateson’s use of the

word ‘plateau’ as that which designates “continuous, self-vibrating region of

intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or

external end”7 and conclude that it is “a regrettable characteristic of the Western

mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of

evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value” and

they consider what would happen if a book, rather than being “composed of

chapters” with culminations and termination points” were “composed instead of

plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain?”

(1987, p.22). While a discussion of transcendence will form part of the conclusion of

this thesis, it is important to note that the term is used more to depict moments of

transcendence, rather than a momentous culminating point.

7 See Bateson, 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. p.113.

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For Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.25) that the rhizome “is always in the middle,

between things”, makes asking questions like: “Where are you going? Where are you

coming from? What are you heading for” useless and renders concepts like

“[m]aking a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero” a “false

conception of voyage and movement”. Instead they propose “another way of

travelling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and

going rather than starting and finishing”. For them:

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.

In the rehearsal process, ideas about linearity are very tangible for the performer.

According to the traditional language of realistic acting, it is possible to employ

time-based, lineal thinking to the art of character building. Terms like ‘back-story’,

‘psychological motivation’, ‘obstacles’ and ‘objectives’ are all based on such

thinking. Other acting traditions focus more on heightened, externalized, physically-

based performance. In The Physics Project it became necessary to swap back and

forth between these supposedly oppositional ways of talking about performance. And

yet these contradictions needed to co-exist, the performers needed to understand the

linearity of a moment, they had to find a beforehand in work that manipulates notions

of past, present and future.

There are resonances here of ‘jo-ha-kyu’, the aesthetic concept central to the

Japanese Noh theatre, but which originated from ‘Gagaku’, ancient court music and

which has also been adopted as a principle for poetry, tea ceremony and flower

arrangement. ‘Jo-ha-kyu’ is generally taken to mean a three-part piece of music

which gradually increases in tempo. ‘Jo’ means “beginning of preparation”, ‘ha’

means “breaking”, and ‘kyu’ means 'rapid' or 'urgent'. ‘Jo’ has no definite beat, ‘ha’

has a somewhat slow beat with percussion overall, and ‘kyu’ has a rather fast beat

(Goto, 1980, p.124). Kunio Komparu (1983, p.25) highlights the significance of ‘jo-

ha-kyu’, as opposed to ‘beginning – middle – end’ or ‘slow – medium – fast’ when

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he outlines that ‘Jo’ means beginning, as in beginning – middle – end and therefore

“refers to position and thus is a spatial element”. ‘Ha’ means “break or ruin” and so

“suggests destruction of an existing state and thus is a disordering element”. ‘Kyu’

means fast tempo and so “refers to speed and thus is a temporal element”. Thus the

concept of ‘jo-ha-kyu’ “unifies the contradiction of the essentially opposing concepts

of space and time by binding them with a breaking element. The result is the

discovery of beauty in unbalanced harmony and a process for reaching fulfilment”.

In a mediated performance environment, time often has the quality of Deleuze and

Guattari’s ‘middle.’ For Auslander, the broadcast flow is a vanishing, a constant

disappearing of what has just been shown. Television’s presence to the viewer is

subject to constant flux: it is only intermittently “present,” as a kind of writing on the

glass, “caught in a dialectic of constant becoming and constant fading” (Cubitt, 1998,

pp.30-31). Even light, as Einstein pointed out, as it originates from the sun and

strikes an object that our eyes rest upon, enters our pupils carrying with it the image

of that object from the moment before, an infinitesimal but measurable interval.

Thus, when we see an object we are really seeing it in the state it was a moment

before: “Light always carries within it the frozen moment of an image’s creation”

(Shlain, 1991, p.122). This relates conceptually to the moment when the ‘Australian

Woman’ experientially realises that the horizon’s curved, not straight as it appears.

This moment which happens in the opening moments of The Uncertainty Principle,

as she attempts to escape via the shaft of light cutting across her box, demonstrates

that the essence of an object/subject cannot be captured in one frozen moment, but

rather needs to be shown changing over time – “an object must have durations

besides three extensions in space” (Shlain, 1991, p.110). It accords also with the

notion of staging the in-between – which in terms of the characters occurs

emotionally, socially and physically, and in terms of the form of The Physics Project

occurs between the technological and the purely live.

Multiple and exponential associations exist in the connection between the live and

the mediated. Every time a new piece of technology is added to the live performance

the possible associations for actors (and audience) grow exponentially. Since the

structure of rehearsals and other time-related factors meant that there was never a

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time when new things weren’t being added, the possibility of choreographing these

associations became impossible. This also happened in the on-site shooting we

conducted when filming in the street or in actors’ homes. In those moments, amidst

all the planning and attempts to orchestrate the elements, there were times where a

theoretical grounding for the ‘middle’ is a particularly reassuring tool for a director.

Mediated Actors

A result of the interaction of the live and the mediated is what Emily Thomas (2006a,

p.10) identifies as “the potential to make the ‘live’ appear even more ‘live’”. This

would seem to parallel Susan Broadhurst’s (1999, p.176) suggestion that hybrid

theatre or liminal performance evokes a kind of “(hyper)reality based on the

juxtaposition of separate situations” which rather than “represent actuality” questions

the condition of reality. Another way to enhance the live is to limit the amount of

interactions between live performers. In The Physics Project this only happened on

three occasions: between the ‘Blonde Woman’ and ‘Gabriel’ as narrated by

‘Miranda’ and performed with a heightened physicality; the moment when ‘Mirand’a

first steps out from behind the screen carrying a light which she uses to manipulate

the shadows of the ‘Blonde Woman’ and ‘Gabriel’ and; the closing moment when

the ‘Narrator’ brings ‘Miranda’ and the ‘Australian Woman’ together. The

complementarity apparent in the interaction of the live and the mediated thus

generated a new way of understanding and experiencing both. For Erica Field (2006,

p.1), playing the ‘Australian Woman’, “the incursion of technology” reaffirmed,

rather than fragmented or disembodied “the organic body through its relationship to a

new technologised environment”. For her, the position of the contemporary

performer is one of:

… a continual vibration between self and other, or rather self and selves: a liminal state between here and now, there and then. The awareness of oneself amongst a multitude of networked and extended selves in turn alters the way in which the contemporary performer approaches the act of performing (Field, 2006, pp.1-2).

For some of the other actors, though, the experience of working with technology

generated an experience of fractured, unstable or multiple identities. For Hanna

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Wood, playing ‘Miranda’ mostly as a silhouette created through light or data

projection, this “deliberate eschewing of ‘Miranda’s’ visual presence through the live

and mediated form” (Wood, 2006, p.8) generated ambiguity around character

identity.

For Emily Thomas (2006a, p.2), the defining experience of approaching her role/s in

The Physics Project “was primarily defined by the fragmentation and re-joining of

body and voice”. According to Holmberg (1996, p.179) mediating the voice, whether

through amplifying the live actor or synching the live actor to a prerecorded voice,

the effect is of breaking down the “conventional relationship between person and

voice, actor and voice, and voice and audience” so that the voice “no longer

represents a character, no longer utters a speaking subject”. For Thomas (2006a, p.2),

the use of technology, particularly digital video and voice recording, “fragmented”

her being. Her designation in the list of characters in the script for The Physics

Project exposes her decentred selves: she is ‘Female Voice’ and she is ‘Blonde

Woman’ and she is ‘Jean Harlow’. Here are her three selves, voice (sound only), live

flesh (no sound) and mediated light (filmed image with words not in synch). When

Thomas was in role as the ‘Female Voice’ (an event that occurred early in the

rehearsal process in a recording studio prior to the live performance in the Loft) she

used a microphone as a prosthetic device which ensured that the ‘live’ converged

seamlessly with the mediated, rather than being overwhelmed by or placed in

opposition to it. Her voice was simultaneously ‘live’ and ‘mediated’ or ‘remediated’:

“the representation of one medium in another” (Bolter and Grusin, 1999, p.45).

The work of Robert Wilson can act as a precedent for ways of reading the impact of

mediating the voice of the live actor. Laurence Shyer (1989, p.236) maintains that

mediating and dispersing the performer’s voice radically alters “the relationship of

the speaker to the audience, the text and his [sic] own body”. He quotes from

German reviewers who remark that one of the consequences of this altered

relationship is the impression that “it is not the person who speaks the language, but

that the language is using the person to be spoken by it” and that once separated from

the actor speech belongs to the space: “a spatial, not written, text”.

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Another consequence is that performer “must surrender some of his [sic] natural authority to a new collaborator – the sound designer, who now stands between him and the audience” (Dietrich, 1992, p.124).

Dividing the spatial location of the voice evokes Complementarity’s depiction of

light as both a wave and a particle. When the live performer’s voice occupies

different spaces at once and “may suddenly travel throughout the theatre at random”

(Dietrich, 1992, p.124) uncertainty surfaces, giving rise to such questions as: What

constitutes the performer - the live body or the mediated voice? And, where does

identity reside?

In the case of the live actor working with a mediated voice, the “filtering and

distribution” of her voice and body enabled Thomas (2006, p.4) as the ‘Blonde

Woman’ to perceive them as “materials”, rather than parts of herself. In the stage

directions ‘Jean Harlow’ is described as:

… a piece of black and white video of the BLONDE WOMAN dressed like Jean Harlow in a white satin dress, so blonde her hair is white in the black and white rendering of her image and her lips are black…Her lips are not in synch with the words we hear from the FEMALE VOICE (May and Mercer, 2006, p.20), (Appendix Three, p.150).

In rehearsals we worked first on the ‘Female Voice’. In our work on this voice we

split it according to what it would be played in conjunction with i.e., the live ‘Blonde

Woman’ present in Mexico, the live ‘Blonde Woman’ upon her return to the mid-

west or in the mediated ‘Jean Harlow’ personae. In improvisations designed to

generate and distinguish the three voices we focused on building imaginary spaces

and scenarios for each of them to inhabit. By employing “visual and spatial

metaphors” we were able to map the different voices required. Committing to this

vocal recording so early in the rehearsal period generated a degree of anxiety for the

performer, which she ascribed to “a subconscious concern of ‘If I am ‘seen’ but not

‘heard’ (in any way other than via mediated technology), will I be truly ‘present’ in

the ‘live’ space?’” (Thomas, 2006a, p.3).

Thomas identified this emphasis on the visual via McLuhan’s (1967, p.117) notion

that most people “find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect

the ear; they don’t trust it. In general we feel more secure when things are visible,

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when we can ‘see for ourselves’”. It became apparent in rehearsing the piece that part

of the ‘Female Voice’s’ strength comes from her mediated forms and that the more

mediated she is the more confident she is. As the media gets stripped back, her

resolve weakens until her final appearance (in the flesh with light in hand) casting

her own shadow onto the screen upon which her daughter is also a silhouette, she

finally has a real, present interaction with her daughter ‘Miranda’. This moment,

which was not written into the script, but came out of the rehearsal process,

demonstrated how without a mediated voice or digital image, ‘the Blonde Woman’

literally becomes the shadow that crosses her daughter’s life.

In writing about the process, Thomas proposed another way of framing a discussion

of the live performer working in a mediated space. She employed Edward Gordon

Craig’s concept of the ‘über-marionette’ which advocates the “use of masks and the

transformation and de-personalization of the human body with the help of unwonted

forms and materials” (Bablet, 1966, p.112). For Thomas, her recorded voice, in

particular, acted as a mask, making her “un-natural”, it compelled her “to pay

attention” to her movement and to rely on physical means of expression, to re-create

instead of reproducing” (Bablet, 1966, p.110). It is important to clarify that Craig is

not seeking to replace actors with marionettes. On the contrary, as he discusses in his

essay “The Actor and the Űber-Marionette”, by coining the term ‘über-marionette’

he is suggesting that actors need to create a new form of acting and that it should

mainly consist of “symbolic gesture”:

To-day they impersonate and interpret; to-morrow they must represent and interpret; and the third day they must create. By this means style may return (Craig, 1911, p.61).

In this depiction, Craig outlines a type of acting that exists between representation

and interpretation, between the external and the internal. For Thomas, focusing on

the technical factors of the performance also enabled another way to define the ‘live’,

allaying anxiety that her recorded voice was somehow dead or absent. She wrote in

her performance journal: “My voice IS present in the space – in fact, if anything, it’s

amplified, it’s moving through the space and it’s guiding the action onstage”

(Thomas, 2006a, p.6). In this case the conflation of the live and the mediated created

a third space, what Thomas describes as a place not “of this world”. This ability,

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enabled by live performance, which integrates technology to exist beyond the here

and now but still be in the here and now, could perhaps best be summed up as

transcendence.

The Mediated Actor as Observer-Participant

In a Meyerhold workshop I undertook with Gennadi Bogdanov at the Australian

International Workshop Festival in 2000, he attributed to Meyerhold the statement

that ‘an actor should be both a soldier and a commander of their actions’. This

concept became a key image of my work with actors. Russian director Vsevolod

Meyerhold’s work with biomechanics “represented a theatrical attempt to create a

meeting-ground for the interplay of biology and technology” (Giannachi, 2004, p.1)

and as such it provides a good precedent for The Physics Project.

Alan Read (2004, p.243) suggests that a trained and informed performer may be able

to work on a polycentric basis by experiencing and performing simultaneously. One

example of this occurs in The Physics Project when the live ‘Australian Woman’ is

working with her videographic twin, work which required the combination of precise

technical skills (like timing and rhythm) with performing skills like interpretation

and the ability to connect with herself as ‘scene partner’. Erica Field (2006, p.6), the

actor who played the ‘Australian Woman’, likened her experience to Stelarc’s bodily

presence or Paul Sermon’s telematic encounters – “a dual embodiment: the

performer becomes at once the objective viewer of the work, as well as the subjective

participant in the work” (Field, 2006, p.6). She drew on Rachel Rosenthal’s process

of constructing or performing a character:

In acting, or playing a character, you want to impersonate the personality of a person that is not yourself. A persona, however, is an artefact, a fabrication, that corresponds to what you want to project from yourself, from within. It is like taking a facet, a fragment, and using that as a seed to elaborate on. It is you and yet not you – a part of you but not the whole. It is not a lie, but never the full truth (quoted by Lampe, 2002, pp.296-97).

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A perfect encapsulation of Complementarity and of the experience of the matrixed

and nonmatrixed performers in The Physics Project!

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Chapter Four: Conclusion –Prosthesis/Transcendence

“In short, art represents the area of furthest advance around man’s [sic] growing energy, the area in which nascent truths condense, take on their first form, and become animate, before they are definitely formulated and assimilated. This is the effective function and role of art in the general economy of evolution” (Teilhard de Chardin, 1975, pp.90-91).

Introduction

Chapter Four specifically responds to the research question: What are the devices in

contemporary performance making and contemporary performance that extend the

reach of the performance? It does this via what will be called the prosthetic aesthetic

and transcendence, two devices that have emerged from the application of

Complementarity and the Uncertainty Principle to the creation of The Physics

Project.

The Prosthetic Aesthetic

That “the separation between the observer and the observed is always more-or-less

arbitrary” (Harrison, 2000, p.8) has already been established by Heisenberg’s (1990,

p.46) reminder “that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our

method of questioning”. Bohr argued the case thus:

We customarily think of the outside world as separate from ourselves, and the boundary between the two is the surface of our skin. However, think of a blind person who gets around with the assistance of a cane. In time that person will probably treat the cane as part of his or her body, and will think of the outside world as beginning just at the tip of the cane. Now imagine the blind man's sense of touch extending out of the tip of the cane and into the roadway itself. Imagine it extending further, down the block, into the countryside, to the whole world. There is no point where the blind man ends and the world begins. Similarly, we can not say which is the system and which is us observing it (quoted by Harrison, 2000, p.8).

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Bohr’s image of the blind man with his cane, and more specifically that there is no

point ‘where the blind man ends and the world begins’, resonates with my interest in

the prosthetic that developed over the course of The Physics Project. In his critical

work Prosthesis, David Wills (1995, p.11) uses the term to refer to “the awkward

conjunction of two discourses”: the way Art relies on the mechanical to bring about

relations between ‘opposites’. In the oppositional pairs to which he refers,

“difference is the whole matter at stake, and yet … rigorous differentiation would

entail the collapse of this entire critical edifice” (1995, p.10).

Ultimately, that which extends the blind man’s reach can no longer be separated

from the man or the thing to which he reaches. It is clearly not him, but also no

longer manifestly not not him. The unreconciled nature of this relationship echoes

my interest in the writing of Luce Irigaray (1981, p.103):

One must listen to her differently in order to hear an “other meaning” which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilized. For when “she” says something, it is already no longer identical to what she means. Moreover, her statements are never identical to anything. Their distinguishing feature is one of contiguity. They touch (upon).

At the core of Irigaray’s feminist approach is the essence of the prosthetic aesthetic, that

which reaches towards, but what it touches is always changing. The metaphor is

never still: meaning never solidifies. In The Physics Project, the characterisation of

prosthesis fits with Eco’s definition of an open work and its “kaleidoscopic capacity”

(1989, p.12). In a more focused appraisal of its relationship with the dramaturgical

process, it was evident in the investigation of how technology extends the reach of

the individual in contemporary society and also aligns with the project’s thematic

preoccupation with identities in flux.

Regarding the former, McLuhan (1967, pp.31-40) has written on the integration of

technology into everyday life:

The wheel…is an extension of the foot … the book is an extension of the eye…clothing, an extension of the skin…electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.

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Gabriella Giannachi (2004, p.8) draws attention to Sue-Ellen Case’s recognition of

“the performativity of human-computer interaction … in the prosthetic use of the

mouse”. Here, Case (1996, p.94) states that “[t]ogether, the mouse and the human

constitute an entity”. By blurring the distinction between the binaries of human and

machine, The Physics Project sought to ‘enact’ the extended technological reach of

the performer in time and space. Within the narrative, ‘Miranda’ and the ‘Australian

Woman’ are dislocated/disconnected by space/distance and time/memory and it is

only through their mediated interactions, their “prosthetic embellishments”, or

devices, that they begin to extend their reach and to connect (Wood, 2006, p.8).

Hanna Wood cites the use of the laptop, used by both characters to interact with

other characters across time and space, thereby allowing multiple times and spaces to

co-exist and to enact the characters’ inhabitation of multiple identities. This accords

with Turkle’s (1995, p.260) characterisation of how life ‘on-line’ contributes “to a

general reconsideration of traditional, unitary notions of identity.” Both the literal

devices and the philosophical implications that arise from the prosthetic aesthetic

extend the reach of the contemporary performance maker and the work that they do.

Transcendence

Contained within prosthesis, or the notion of ‘extending the reach’, there exists the

concept of transcendence, an imperative present in both science and art. Both

disciplines seek principles, something larger than themselves they align with,

something that can tell the story of us. For art (contemporary performance) it is a

quest for form, that which seeks to answer the questions posed by content. For

science (physics) it is a unified theory of everything, one that would explain and

unify all the laws of nature. According to Greene (2000, p.283) such a unified field

theory “would declare that things are the way they are because they have to be that

way” and establishing such inevitability would amount to a declaration “that the

universe could not have been different”. Contained within this pursuit – and it was

Einstein’s lifelong, unfulfilled quest – is an aspiration for certainty, a yearning to

transcend the unknown.

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Yet transcendence, by its very nature, is transitory. It is a moment of illumination, of

clarity, but one that is framed against an obverse, an uncertainty. It’s what William

James (1952, p.158) describes as what you catch out of the corner of your eye when

you turn the gas up to see what darkness is. Every flight requires a perch, and it is

from this resting place that one can reflect on, but no longer be in, the moment of

transcendence. In contemporary performance making, the articulation of a form as

the processual response to a specific type of content is the equivalent of a unified

field theory. Lepage has said, championing McLuhan:

In theatre, the audience has to be immersed in the argument … every sense has to seize it and so the form has to become an incarnation of the subject and themes … If we have nothing to say, the form remains simply the form, the medium the medium. But if we have something to say, the medium will be the message (Lepage quoted by Charest, 1998, p.160).

So perhaps a useful way of thinking about both physics and contemporary

performance is to consider uncertainty and transcendence as a Complementary pair

of opposites that shapes them both. Complementarity doesn’t resolve tension, it

acknowledges that experience requires more than one description. In a conversation I

conducted with physicist F. David Peat he related an anecdote, one which echoes

Kierkegaard’s ‘qualitative dialectic’, about Bohm’s notion that the problem with

solving the tension between two things is that it dissipates the energy (Peat, 2005,

Interview). Without energy there is only stagnation, with tension there is the

possibility of the ‘beauty’ Dirac aspires to when he said: “it is more important to

have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiments” (quoted by

Mackay, 1991, p.74).

Accordingly, The Physics Project is transcendent because its form brings together

the live and the pre-recorded and the web-cast. The performance as a whole exists

beyond the here and now but is still in the here and now. The ‘Narrator’

acknowledges this:

NARRATOR: Once upon a time you will meet an old woman who has crossed over from one path, the path of making family, and set off on another, a solo path. Here on this path, she travels without a time and space because all times and spaces are present and everyone she’s ever

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known and all the times she’s ever had with them are here. Here your best friend Anna who died many years ago is making frangipani necklaces with Miranda, the American woman you met along the way. All your friends scattered around the world, live here all together. Every idea discussed, every story told, every country visited has its place. Einstein and the Red Queen are sharing a gondola in Venice, Alice and Jane Eyre are standing at the edge of the well of Virgins, Jean Harlow is lying low on Coolangatta beach. And the future’s there calling you with as much form and substance as the past that’s holding you. It’s available to you at any time this path but getting there the first time could take your whole life (May and Mercer, 2006, pp.24-25), (Appendix Three, pp.154-55).

The following moment, when the ‘Narrator’ ascends the ladder and descends with

the light in her hand, is thus both literally and metaphorically transcendent: the

merging of the live, the convergence of form and content, her tangible rejection of

what the DaVinci quote suggests and subsequent acceptance of her split self:

With my alone-ness beside me I have everyone I need. With me watching her and she watching me, together we are what the other will be, the thing the two of us equal (May and Mercer, 2006, p.25), (Appendix Three, p.155).

Dafoe’s (Auslander, 1995, p.308) characterisation of acting as “meditative” as

opposed to transformative provides another rhizomatic point of entry into an example

of how transcendence might operate in contemporary performance. In defining

performance as “being … and doing”, a matter of “re-enacting decisions” made in

rehearsals, rather than “interpreting a role”, Dafoe contends that as a performer his

mind “is left to explore his own relationship to the task he is carrying out”:

The way I get off in the performances is when I hit those moments of real pleasure and real clarity and an understanding about myself in relationship to the structure: it is work, it is an exercise of me for two hours, behaving a certain way and it can become meditative (Dafoe quoted by Auslander, 1995, p.309).

In this meditative state, Dafoe alludes to a type of cathartic release, moments of

pleasure and clarity that must, one can assume, supplant moments of less pleasure

and clarity: transcendence!

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A Refrain

It is one of the basic presuppositions of science that we speak of measurements in a language that has basically the same structure as the one in which we speak of everyday experience. We have learned that this language is an inadequate means of communication and orientation, but is nevertheless the pre-supposition of all sciences….For if we want to say anything at all about nature-and what else does science try to do?- we must somehow pass from mathematical to everyday language (Bohr quoted by Heisenberg, 1971, p.130).

The creation and this discussion of The Physics Project has required multiple acts of

translation as theories of physics are first translated into the ‘everyday language’ of

physicists then into the language of contemporary performance. The move from

representation to abstraction that characterises both the history of art and the history

of physics is central to Shlain’s argument about a connection between the paradigms.

This move is also evident in the history of performance and its development into the

language and poetics of contemporary performance. Citing Freud’s example of

comparing “the progress of a civilization’s entire people to the development of a

single individual” in Civilization and its Discontents, Shlain (1991, p.17) proposes

that the preverbal to verbal developmental process an infant undergoes from

identifying an object as image (‘imaging’ it) to identifying it as word (naming it), is a

development in thinking from representational to abstract that “is also present in the

civilization at large”. For Shlain (1991, p.18) “revolutionary art can be understood as

the preverbal stage of a civilization first contending with a major change in its

perception of the world … as a Distant Early Warning system of the collective

thinking of a society. He goes further to suggest that:

The artist, with little or no awareness of what is going on in the field of physics, manages to conjure up images and metaphors that are strikingly appropriate when superimposed upon the conceptual framework of the physicist’s later revisions of our ideas about physical reality (Shlain, 1991, p.19).

For The Physics Project this concept manifested in the way characters used

knowledge from seemingly disparate paradigms of knowledge and braided a

philosophy to live by. Influenced by the writing of Cixous, this crossover between

the metanarrative and the individual could also be said to relate to the very dilemma

at the core of contemporary physics: namely that the theoretical frameworks for

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general relativity and Quantum Mechanics, that which attempt to understand the

universe “on the largest of scales” and “the smallest of scales” respectively “are

mutually incompatible” (Greene, 2000, p.3).

The Physics Project was by its very nature a ‘project’ (undertaken for assessment, a

casting on the water, a blueprint). In geometry a ‘project’ means to draw straight

lines from a centre or parallel lines through every point of a given figure to produce a

corresponding figure on a surface or a line by intersecting it: in psychology it is to

attribute an emotion to an external object or person, especially unconsciously. The

Physics Project was a contemplation, an experiment, the putting together of elements

around ideas conjured up by time, space, light, Complementarity. It was an

autobiography, an imagined biography, a launching, something cast out in many

directions, a projectile. It was something that began from one person, then two and

has since expanded to be the result of many. The first two versions were the work of

nineteen artists working together, this third version has introduced another nineteen

people into the mix. It is the result of a collaboration between an expanding group of

people in a series of times and places – of not enough time, or money, or sleep, or

caffeine. It is the result of creative thinking on those limitations, of a lot of good will

and yet equally it is the result of too much time, too much money, too many

resources – both ‘not enough and too much’ existing simultaneously.

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Appendix One:

Selected Entries from Seven Black Journals (April 2003 - April 2006)

Including: notes from rehearsals; reflections from showings (and commentary on those reflections); conversations with Amantha (live, on the telephone, email); meetings with Brad; quotes from my reading and; notes from “Science, Art and the Sacred” workshop at the Pari Centre for New Learning, Italy, October 2005. Notes from Rehearsals from New York Showing (Feb 2003) – (Black Journal #1): If we could have a feedback session after the Magdalena showing, I would want to discuss the following issues about running distributed performance:

Simultaneity Dramatic form/dramaturgy Narrative/integration of character Live and digital character Not letting the rehearsal process be hijacked by technology Performance from audience perspective

Alas, no such session has been organised, so these remain issues that I’m focused on (Black Journal #1). Audience Feedback – New York Showing (Feb 2003):

• “Physics indicates multiplicity rather than duality” • “The conflation of physics and performance felt more successful when sound

or image was attached to the theories, otherwise the audience felt they were purely being “talked to”, they were more interested in watching the physics happen, rather than being told how it’s interpreted”

• “The protagonist’s journey is from a disconnected individual to one who is aware of her connection to others” (Black Journal #1).

Journal Entry (the day after NY Showing, Feb 2003): It is the morning after the showing and there’s lots of stuff to consider. I wish I’d allowed an extra day in my itinerary so that Amantha and I could have time to sit down with all that happened and make a plan of action before she leave the U.S. and before we go into rehearsals in Australia. There is much work to be done in terms of clarifying ideas and how they progress over the course of the piece. The opening sequence is still not right, nor is the role of Fiona M., particularly made apparent by the ‘NY-ville’ audience, who have no sense of her journey, since she is only a very

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distant figure revealed via video. So she is a good place to start as we begin addressing what needs to be done before Magdalena – a good solution is to have two Fionas – or rather two narrator figures, each live in each space, that way they become collaborator/observer/participants in much the same way that Amantha and I operate in this process, perhaps we need to play these roles in Phase 3. We need to lessen her stage time perhaps, without lessening her role, so to speak. The differences between what happens in Australia and what happens in the U.S., becomes the variables of the experiment and w can still illuminate her realisation that she cannot be a mere observer, that she must also participate. Her relationship to all the other characters perhaps also did not communicate clearly – should they be figments of her imagination or actually the people in her life. I’m still partial to the Wizard of Oz solution, that is kind of in place at the moment, but once again clarity is called for. It’s interesting that the very crux of the piece (the fact that it is in two distinct locations) did not communicate. I think it’s there in the characters’ stories, but needs to be tweaked for the audience. It’s a fairly important point because it is the hook of which everything hangs. There are a number of additional points from my notes last night that we can fix for Magdalena, to do with integrating the live actors with the media and a number that we’ll have to solve because the performances in the media are not as useful or appropriate for the ideas that we need to communicate. After all the anxiety of not having enough time to work the live actors with the video – I think I was worried that the essential ideas wouldn’t be apparent – it was gratifying to see that despite the middy parts – there is something at the core of this piece and in some particular moments – that work!! (Black Journal #1). Commentary On Above Post (March 2003): At this stage when we were still thinking that the show would have two versions, one in New York and one in Brisbane it was clear that the Narrator/Chief Protagonist couldn’t be live in only one place, because this mean that the centrality of her experience as protagonist could not be sustained for the live NY audience if she was merely a very distant figure revealed via video (Black Journal #1). Blurb for Magdalena showing (March 2003): The Physics Project began as a collaboration between directors – American Amantha May and Australian Leah Mercer. Since February 2001 this collaboration has expanded to include thirteen actors and eight other artists. The Physics Project grew out of our interest in juxtaposing art and science, our mostly liberal arts education had not equipped us for this line of thinking or the insights available to us from doing so. Both science and art should change the way we think about the world and our place in it. Starting with the premise of a protagonist, Fiona M., who applies the changing theories of physics in seeking to understand the connections between people and between herself and her surroundings (Black Journal #1). Findings from Magdalena (April 2003) – (Black Journal #2): Can the investigation of love relationships (which is basically what this version of the script is, a series of love relationships) be opened up to a bigger sense of our relationship to the world? (Black Journal #1) and repeated again after the Magdalena showing as “I think that we need to branch out from the focus on relationships, to

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include self and self in the world” – this seems to relate to the idea of the metanarrative in that it positions relationships as a kind of metanarrative (a way in which we seek to position and understand ourselves) and in terms of form and focus it traces the work’s trajectory from a show around a big idea (i.e., the connection between art and physics), to a show about relationships, to a show about the connection between a big idea and relationships – this in turn, seems to trace insights attained through quantum physics (which the work also embodies) about the indelible connections between the micro and the macro. After the Magdalena showing I wrote: “that the moments of simultaneity, overlap and repetition created by the video conferencing (the ones that had meaning [for me]) did not necessarily translate to an audience in the way that they did to me. Therefore, these moments need to be choreographed, we need to direct the audiences’ attention to them, make them narratively integrated (while still leaving room for the happy accident!)” In the loft version the results of this observation are apparent in expected and unexpected ways. To be expected the two ‘web-streamed’ characters became explicitly “narratively integrated”, both the American Woman and the Father characters fulfilled specific functions that forwarded the narratives within the performance. Perhaps, unexpectedly the “happy accident” took a more prominent role….[go on here to discuss how multiple technologies increase exponentially the possibilities of such ‘accidents’ and how these themselves become part of the narrative…]. Also, what do I have to say about “simultaneity, overlap and repetition” in the loft version??? Also Keith Armstrong raised a question: “What’s the aesthetic of web-cast authenticity that video can’t give?” After the Magdalena showing it became apparent that it was necessary to ‘limit the palette’, “it makes sense to focus on time and space in a show that bridges both – but I’m not sure that I’m ready to abandon what we’ve learnt about synchronicity, speed of light and Quantum Mechanics”. And yet even if these characters or specific theories were lost in the loft version, their spectre remained. This personification of theoretical concepts is not without its precedents: “Time and Space are Real Beings: a Male and a Female. Time is a Man, Space is a Woman” (William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment) (Black Journal #2). Notes From My Research – (Black Journal #3): “A human being is a part of the whole called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in all its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and of a foundation for inner security” (Einstein, Albert. New York Post, November 28 1972, p.12). “Both disciplines [of internal solitude and external community] come together precisely because the space within us and the space among us are the same space”

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(Henri Nouwen, Making All Things New Again, 1982, p.90) (Also try A Letter of Consolation). “When we look at the night sky we are looking at history – not just a distant memory of the past but a record of how the heavens looked hundreds of thousands of years ago” (Heaven & Earth: Unseen by the Naked Eye, p.4) (Black Journal #3). Telephone Conversation with Amantha (5/5/03): Brainstorming #1 – • Cluster the piece around titles like: “The Physics of Travel”’ “The Physics of

Identity”; “The Physics of Attraction”… • Make it the journey of one character, each of the titles/theories representing one

aspect of their life, i.e., their struggles with identity, with relationships, attempting to understand their place in the world.

• The mediated performer needs to function differently from the live actor. • Throw out the found physics text and write scenes that employ the theories

performatively. *most importantly! • The overall analogy between physics and self could be akin to the connection

Shlain makes between art and physics i.e., that it is not deliberate. We can draw out this analogy by starting with images like light as a messenger between characters. Eventually this will help to solve and ground “why physics?”

Content Synopsis Synchronicity – the unknown, spirit/religion. (Connects to the possibility of multi-dimensional space and to string theory, a theory that integrates the large and the small. Also could connect Dinah to Jack). Quantum Mechanics – one person holding opposing views. Also contained within this storyline is the Uncertainty Principle - which says that two people looking at the same event will see it differently and that the act of observation will inevitably alter what’s being observed and the Determined Universe – I’m not sure that this actually belongs to the Anna character. Space – begins as a separate and self-contained entity, with light as the messenger between it and time. Falling monologues – a loner who is negotiating being affected by outside forces. Time – concerned with all the consequences of Einstein’s understanding of time and motion, particularly that time elapses slowly for individuals in motion. Thus she becomes a figure who needs to be constantly moving, tries to slow time. Space/Time – a union, the making of a life/reality together.

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Speed of Light – he does it to fuck with time. Thus Evan could be connected to Grace. He does it to fuck with “reality”. Expanding Universe – replacing the individual-focus with the realisation that you are part of a whole. Participatory Universe – this is really a result of the Uncertainty Principle, right? Once you realise that you change the outcome of something by the very act of observing it, you have no choice but to participate. Black Hole/White Hole, Fission, Big Bang – fairly self-explanatory concepts. They could probably be narratively slotted in anywhere, perhaps a question remains about their inclusion.

Form Synopsis Use of perspective Backwards Radios/Telephones/TVs – in our lives Light as a messenger/attraction (image of cigarettes, hearts, houses…) Interacting across time and space. There are more to be added here, they need to be extracted from the script!!! (Black Journal # 3). Telephone Conversation with Amantha (14/5/03): Brainstorming #2 – Amay’s response: • We need to rethink the inclusion of the Determined Universe, because it is

Laplace and it predates and is replaced Quantum Mechanics • She is interested in looking at how space and falling/gravity can be different

facets of Jack’s experience and in separating that from the whole space-time conclusion.

• She is interested in looking at synchronicity, falling and the use of perspective • Repetition and shifting of shadows (AKA cubism) as another of the possible

forms available to us (i.e., one that we had in the 1st draft, but we lost in the 2nd) • Keep the "Brainstorming Bullet Points" in mind as possible elements to be used,

also the list of forms, and consider other forms in old script for possible material as well.

Leah is interested in: • Bohr’s Complementarity and Heisenberg’s response i.e., the Uncertainty

Principle • Both structurally and content-wise; Light/Horizon/Perspective (in the latter I’m

concerned with how perspective acts as an empowering of the individual and seems to be the antithesis of the Expanding Universe and Quantum Mechanics.

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Task Assignment Divvy up the theories, and write without rules. We can use the existing characters, can base things on existing scenes, but could also invent new characters or scenes, or make things in the current script relate in new ways or WHATEVER... Starting from image and/or emotion, not necessarily character or narrative. Intuitive response/writing, soft brain response to hard material DEADLINES: email 2 pages of 25/5; talk 26/5; 5 pages mid-July (Black Journal #3). Notes for Telephone Conversation with Amantha (27/5/03): Brainstorming #3 - 1st Writing Feedback ON LEAH’S WRITING (Leah says): • I am more attached to the structure and images than to the text - particularly the

first monologue, which is a stopgap measure in its current form. • I noticed that I am writing really differently. What I have gained from the process

so far is a greater awareness of the planes of possibility available to me and of the layers that I have to work with. However I'm still not really capable of thinking about two distinct shows and of making two different things for two different audiences.

• At this point I am more about structure, hence the great swabs of text that I haven't written

ON AMANTHA’S WRITING (Leah says): • I feel what’s really strong and clear about what you’ve done is that you’ve taken

the essence of what we already know about our characters and turned it into something new.

• Also, you've turned the physics text into conversation and thought. • I think you've made a really important breakthrough in terms of setting up the

world of the piece i.e. how it can come into being and function. • I think that the two different directions and styles that we've headed are not as

oppositional as they may initially seem. I think we should work towards creating something that moves between this real ground (that you've created) and the more surreal world of images and stories that I've started with...almost like parables or dreams or something....

ON AMANTHA’S WRITING (Amantha says): • Some of this writing, came from the email that I sent you dated Wed, 21 May

2003 07:59:21 -0700 (PDT) that said: “and now you are the baby and i'm the awake grown up. one of us always babysits the world when the other sleeps…”

• I was thinking about all the ways we've talked about art and physics and life and physics and I just kept going back to this chant in my head of "I want to know" and I'm trying to fit that into a human realm... (Black Journal #3)

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Telephone Conversation with Amantha (27/5/03): Leah: • What feels right is establishing the character family tree (of sorts), with Fiona

and Dinah at the top (each in different countries but being friends), with Grace knowing Fiona and Dinah knowing Anna and Evan

Amantha: • Also, Grace could turn up in Australia and represent the traveling experience that

Erin and I had for Magdalena. • Perhaps Grace could also provide a third physical location for the performance,

either real or fake. Leah: • I was thinking about the possibility of combining Jack’s experience into the

character of Grace, i.e., doing away with the Jack character altogether. Amantha: • Or, perhaps she meets him during the course of the show. We could re-design

their whole relationship, i.e., she need not necessarily trap him. Leah: • Your writing gave me a possible insight into how we could use Quantum

Mechanics. It need not be about a splitting between two actors, but about the fact that Anna exists in one place as matter (known to Dinah) and in the other place as an idea Fiona has about her, since she’s never actually met her.

Amantha: • I really let go of the idea of each character being attached to one theory. • I was interested in anchoring the piece in the characters’ need to know, of them

trying to make sense of their lives and trying to understanding their lives through their friendships/relationships, which are characterised by distance, aging, change.

• I responded to the sense of past, present and future of relationships in your writing.

Leah: • The two different writing styles (although of course no one is confined to writing

in any one style), need not necessarily be two different worlds. What you’ve written already moves beyond the reality of the email chat by incorporating sections where the typers’ voices and faces becomes audible and visible, so the other more surreal/theatrical stuff could be a further extension of that theatrical convention. Also, the image of one sleeping, while the other one looks after the world, makes me think about a kind of dreamscape??!! (not sure if this is too clichéd, but it’s something to think about).

Next deadline: 5 pages - 20th July (Black Journal #3) Notes from Meeting with Zane Trow & Brad Haseman (June 2003):

• Technology as prosthesis (i.e., something that extends the limits of our body) • Focus on those moments in physics when you could no longer rely on what

was observable • Process: currently working on Australian performance text i.e., those

moments when it requires input from outside sources (portals) will become

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the ingredients for New York performance text which will be different from the Australian one, they will match up only in portal moments

• Perhaps a networked space, a third space, space between NY and Australia. Theatre that exists beyond the here and now, but is still in the here and now (Black Journal #3).

Journal Entry (August 2003): WHAT: I am researching the intersection of the live and the mediated (i.e., distributed) within a collaboratively generated performance piece: The Physics Project which will be co-created/directed with my American collaborator Amantha May. I am also tracing the relationship between live/mediated and form/content and considering the impact this hybrid discipline has on the collaborative process. WHO: I am co-creator and co-director of The Physics Project. While I share responsibility with my collaborator for gathering the dramaturgical research used in the creation of the performance, I am solely responsible for assembling a body of research examining the intersection of the live and the mediated, tracing the relationship between live/mediated, form/content and considering the impact of the discipline upon the process. HOW: DESIGN: RESEARCH: I will conduct a review of theoretical and practical material that investigates the body of the performer – live and mediated. I am seeking a performance style in which the live and the mediated are in a dialogue that is matched at the levels of both form and content. HOW: CONTENT: RESEARCH: I will conduct an audit of dramaturgical issues arising from hybrid performance generating a body of information on its practice and theory and its relationship to form and content. ‘The generation of my performance will take place in a long-distance collaboration conducted via email, blog and telephone. HOW: CONTRIBUTE: KNOWLEDGE: The framework in place for The Physics Project (Black Journal #3). Journal Entry (September 2003): Define my research questions: how fragments of experience and the phenomena of everyday life and the inexplicable can be made coherent in a unifying, overarching move e.g., scientific, spiritual, corporeal….and in self-identity…OR How can new and emerging forms (especially digital capacities) reflect that synthesising move; work to achieve synthesis in a landscape of fragments (Black Journal #3). Journal Entry (After meeting with Brad) (October 2003):

• At last all my cards are on the table and in my exegesis (there is considerable relief here) i.e., the sense that it is now grounded in my own work, rather than the ‘new’ stuff I’m grappling with (integration of live and mediated) an area I always felt myself to be a fraudulent representative of! NOW I feel like I know where to start and that it will actively feed into my creative process.

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• Now, at last of synthesis of all that’s come before, the theoretical/intellectual

training from UQ and the purely practical training from CalArts – this freedom (similar to what I experienced in the writing of Melancholia) should facilitate the integration of theory and practice and feels RIGHT!, like the obvious next step, like an opening out, like a convergence.

• Perhaps a chapter entitled “It’s as if it’s yellow and I just really like blue!”

(quote from Brad’s ‘feedback’ to Magdalena showing, dealing with supervisor/student relationship and/or can creative practice be treated with the same hands (or in the same way as research?) > Q: what’s the relationship of the supervisor to the creative practice?

• How does my work contribute to new knowledge? And the wider good?

Feminist work on knowledge construction (e.g., Irigaray, Kristeva) does this play a role? (Black Journal #3). Journal Entry (November 2003):

• What’s the procedure that connects the conceptual and the practice? • Human’s quest for transcendence, something larger – how can we do this in

the performance form/platform? i.e., performer in Brisbane, flesh and blood transcended for the works to be transcendent, for the form to do what the ideas do. How can we create a form that has this transcendent reach?

• Overcome uncertainty….replaced by multiplicity….certainty is dangerous….celebrate multiplicity (Black Journal #3).

Journal Entry after Confirmation (May 2004):

• How do you theorise and create simultaneously? Look at examples of ficto-criticism e.g., Nicole Brossard theorises what it is to write and create in her experimental writing (Shane Rowlands)

• Focus on your voice/your process. In your discussion of technology your focus in on its reach (Keith Armstrong)

• Simplify – what are the difficulties of contemporary performance making? How does my process answer those questions? How am I using my work to support those questions? (Richard Vella)

• Where do I locate the work contextually in the field of performance? (Zane Trow)

• Notes to self: process of writing = to process of directing (giving birth to a world); use my obsession for recording/writing/journaling (in its many forms) to my advantage; validate it. What about writing the story of the practitioner who disappeared into the house of academia [within] the disappearing body, a series of ficto-critical stories structured around the overlapping key terms? (Black Journal #3).

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Journal Entry (July 2004): personal space / geography /geo-satellite photography (connection between internal and external) time / memory / history light / imagination / portals (Black Journal #3). Journal Entry (26/9/04): Talking to Zane today about the 3rd space/the site/the observed place (but then isn’t that also what happens in theatre…observation!) and about webcams and reality TV shows (and that’s an area that really doesn’t interest me – the uncrafted, the mundane masquerading as interesting. Although Cixous (1994, p.xxi) says:

I see that in the poetic text, often or indeed always, I deal with love which is our fate, twisted thing, tortuous, delicate, eager, insatiable, the best and worst thing, the junction point between everything and nothing, the oxymoronic knot of all existence, love which makes gods and cattle meat of us – but never with hate.

Can it be about friendship? (but I want it to be bigger than that, more important, more connected to the state of the world) friendships that sustain and sustain you – even the ones that haven’t been maintained, that have been left behind – (the residue) – there’s something beautiful but sad about them sitting back there unattended… But if I go this route isn’t it just like a webcam in my bedroom, how do I keep it above that level of mundanity? What about many friendships? – asking people to discuss the one great friendship of their lives and adding to website or performance? (Black Journal #3). Email to Amantha (4/10/04): hey may This is my first attempt to get us caught up. At the moment my head is swarming with a hundred different possible directions for this thing called ‘the physics project’ although, perhaps its not a hundred different possible directions, perhaps they are all connected and I just need someone to point it out to me. So, here are some of my thoughts at the moment ... (but hopefully it will help to trace the journey of my messy thinking…) I am thinking about science/physics as a kind of metanarrative i. ., attempt to find a unifying, overarching narrative to explain the world, to connect the individual to something greater than themselves as a means of understanding their role in the world, as part of a desire for transcendence. So, The Physics Project is in part about our desire for transcendence (which incidentally also occurs in the form that we have chosen i.e., performance transcends the live and the limited bounds of the theatre,

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extending the reach of the performance itself). If the desire for transcendence stems from a search for certainty, my interest in this project stems from a desire to validate uncertainty… We are using physics as a metaphor – metaphor is the reconciliation of opposites (i.e., and science) and The Physics Project looks at what arises when these opposites interact and/or collide. I think that what arises in the relationship between opposites is how much these supposed opposites actually depend on each other for their existence, the internal relies on the external, the scientist on the artist and the artist on the scientist, the wave on the particle…the complementarity of pairs, of opposites… The form and language of our metanarrative of physics is the language of space, time and light. I think that it is a great breakthrough that necessity has forced us to decide that the NY end of the performance is in your apartment. I think that what we should do now is start to make metaphorical connections to space, time and light. Here are some of mine: So space becomes connected to personal space (your apartment), inner space (the workings of an individual person/character i.e., their identity), geographic space (U.S., Australia and the great geographic space we are covering as we connect with one another). I am currently kind of obsessed with aerial and microscopic photography (and how the patterns and shapes that can be found by photographing the land from above are similar to the patterns and shapes that can be found by magnifying a leaf or a human being’s blood vessels) – so there is this recurring theme of the connection between the internal and the external. This also raises ideas and questions about the differences, similarities, look and function of the three performance spaces/sites – i.e., your personal space, the performance space in Brisbane, the 3rd space online which is made up of the material streamed via the web potentially viewed by anyone with access (but which could also be a more fully realised website with links to our other work and other research that I could supply – I’ll talk more about this later). Each of these spaces is a space of observation…Brisbane is a theatre (and I’m still really interested in starting with the kind of camera obscura image that I wrote about in our last brainstorming scene writing), your personal space almost equates to those web-cam sites where people allow themselves to be watched (although ours will be controlled and not so banal) and the web-site is also for observation. The metaphoric possibilities of time: For me time is connected to memory and to history. Here again my interest in aerial photography comes in with the idea that looking at the night sky is like looking at history, a record of how the heavens looked thousands of years ago…. The metaphoric possibilities of light: I think of light technically as the portals that we are using to connect the two simultaneous performances and also of the video footage that will be an element of the Brisbane performance. It makes me think of what Shlain says about how photography literally means “writing with light” and we are using light as one of our textual elements. Light is also about imagination and inspiration, spirituality (inner light).

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So what the hell is this show ABOUT? Can it be about friendship? (but I want it to be bigger than that, more important, more connected to the state of the world!) Can it be about friendships that sustain and sustain us – even the ones that haven’t been maintained, the ones that have been left behind (the residue), there’s something beautiful, but sad about them sitting back there unattended – THEN here I am again back at “sad” and then I’m reminded about how I was watching a documentary about ABBA the other night and Benny (or maybe it was Bjorn – they’ve become identical in their middle-age) said something like “Swedes love to be sad” and that phrase strikes me and I wonder can I quote Benny from ABBA in my PhD or in a piece of theatre for that matter? And then I’m reminded about what Cixous says about how we everything that’s ever been said is part of our cultural and personal make-up (although she said it much more beautifully than that and I’ll have to go and find the quote for you) and then that reminds me of Gods and Cattle and then I start to think that maybe that’s how the 3rd site works….it can become a place to document and trace our other works as well, since I believe it’s all kind of connected (e.g., Melancholia is all about “sad”). Perhaps it could become a s/w/itches website (and perhaps I might be able to get a web design student to work on it). But then I think well if we go this route isn’t it just kind of like having a webcam in your bedroom, how do I raise it above that level – which I think is really the mundane masquerading as interesting??) So then I think again about friendship….what if the central thematic focus is friendship and we or I interview people or do research about the great friendships in people’s lives and that then could become part of the content of the performance…but it could also be a way for a 3rd audience to interact with our website, to tell their own stories about their own great friendships….. So what does all this have to do with science…..but this is where I am today – October 4 2004….this is the current blurb…(what do you think?) The Physics Project is an original work with simultaneous performances in Brisbane and New York. It melds live performance, video and web-streaming and overlaps a narrative of identity with the metanarrative of physics, specifically theories of space, time and light. The Physics Project looks at the impact distance, aging and change has on friendship. At key moments the Brisbane performance text will seek external input. These moments will become the ‘portals’ through which textual information will be sent to or received from New York. The more structured Brisbane performance text will be in contrast to that performed in New York, which will frame itself around and between the portals. Thus, The Physics Project will in essence be three performances in one. There will be the performance viewed by the live audience in Brisbane, the different but complementary performance viewed by the live audience in New York and there will be the third performance made up entirely of the material streamed via the web potentially viewed by anyone with access. The Physics Project (working title – I hate this title now, I wish we could think of a new one! ☺) Amantha May & Leah Mercer (Co-writers, Co-directors) March/April 2006 – The Loft, C.I. Precinct, Williamsbourg, NY, www.s/w/itches.com What do you think….? (Email message)

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Telephone Conversation with Amantha (29/10/04):

• When space, time and light are joined memories are created.

• We must find a central myth/story.

• Opposite depending on each other is an aspect of friendship.

• Video light, theatrical light? Or is light the universal, transcendent.

• Central myth of a woman alone.

• See Joseph Campbell on memory “The Masks of God” – myths recur in different cultures – archetypes as memory deposit.

• “Tell me that story again” takes on a mythology as a guide for living.

• “What’s the myth of your life?”

• NY = memory; Brisbane actors are the present

• Perhaps a light source that is connected to the energy of an actor’s

performance i.e. riding a bicycle that is sourcing the intensity of the light, or rate of talking (Black journal #3).

Journal Entry (15/3/05): e.g., the aerial photography of Bernhard Edmaier WHAT if I draw parallels between what they reveal about landscape observed from a distance and what can be inferred about individuals from afar WHAT if I draw parallels between what is revealed through extreme distance and extreme proximity and then in turn apply this to individuals and to relationships between them WHAT if I draw parallels between the flesh of the earth and flesh It seems that the way to proceed is for Amantha to continue to create her world and for me to create the framework within which her world sits as one of her stories – could be a story that recurs AKA Anna’s synchronicity (Black Journal #3). Journal Entry (23/5/05): I’ve been following tangents…last week looking at aerial photography led me to Susan Greenfield who is both a photographer of “Images from Beneath the Skin” and also a scientist with a speciality in the story of the brain. When reading her book The Private Life of the Brain I came across a reference to Bruno Bettelheim’s patient Joey, an autistic boy (see Horton p.1) who thought he was a machine – what a fantastically evocative image to explore in a piece about technology. So an hour and a half later I had followed many more tangents (hooray for Google) and come up with some sense of the case study of Joey but also the case study of Bettelheim who seems to have manufactured his history as

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a child psychologist after escaping from Nazi Germany. A clear example of someone who constructed his own grand narrative (perhaps) although of course there are conflicting stories about him (although it’s kind of delicious that he appeared as himself in Woody Allen’s Zelig – a character who blends in with his surroundings!) Bettelheim also wrote a book or perhaps it’s better to say he wrote THE book which drew parallels between fairytales and Freudian psychology (The Use of Enchantment) – he also suffered from depression throughout his life and ultimately committed suicide. And so it’s clear that he fits within the many parameters of my unruly study i.e., the grand narrative of science, fairytales (Poppins) and psychology (Melancholia). And so the idea of having “Joey” and “Bettelheim” as characters was born. This in turn seemed to hark back to my earlier thinking about having “Giacometti”, “Walter Benjamin”, “Gertrude Stein” as characters i.e., that my contribution would be a series of monologues (possibly played by one actor) by these characters. The fact that “Joey” and “Bettelheim” knew each other raised the idea of them all having similar connections – yet to be discovered! Then I came across an article that described autism as connected to the contemporary Zeitgeist of the Internet and further that autism as a condition is connected to that person’s perception of time – i.e., “that autistics are out of phase with time as the rest of us experience it. Autism is a form of asynchronicity” (Blume) – so this really consolidated the character of “Joey”. Framing all this is what I’m reading in Greenfield’s book about the connection between the mind and the emotions. Greenfield argues for this connection, that the “emotions are with us all the time”, that they are “the building blocks of consciousness” (21) – that idea of connections is what I’m striving for i.e., I’m arguing against the same thing that Greenfield is arguing against i.e.: “As soon as a system…is reduced to its tiniest components, something special is lost” (9)…this is what the more interesting physicists also argue for, why they connect physics and spirituality…this leads me to the compartment that I’ve divided into i.e., I’m approaching this topic from:

• Physics • Brain studies / science • Psychology / personality • Fairy tale / art • Spirituality

And yet if they’re all played by the same actor… P.S. Is there a way that I can still include the scene of the woman inside the camera obscura within this paradigm? Perhaps the image of such a character in such a context belongs with one of the above character monologues? (Black Journal #3). Telephone Conversation with Amantha (14/5/05) – (Black Journal #4):

• Her story functions because she’s not real, if she’s real it cheapens the story. • Leah’s story could have input from Amantha i.e., that we’ve created this

space together • Leah’s story begins as a woman opening a pinhole camera, she finds

Giacometti / Cixous / Bettelheim

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• Other ways to communicate with Amantha, she sends photos that appear on screen, she’s on web-cam

• Maybe a hint of Amantha’s mum – emailed a photos of her mum in Mexico, a photo of me, Amantha and her dad

• Is an association dramatically interesting? The internet and how we experience the world as a series of associations – ‘dramaturgically autistic’, everywhere I look everything’s relevant!

• Where do I want to end? What’s the final pinnacle for Leah’s story? Work from backwards and funnel everything into that (Black Journal #4).

Telephone Conversation with Amantha (15/5/05):

• Perhaps Leah’s story is a documentary of the process ((Black Journal #4). Telephone Conversation with Amantha (18/5/05):

• Endpoint: that technology enables connections/friendships across/beyond time and space.

• Re: friendship/connection: that what is made in a specific, fleshbound

time and space can be maintained in (albeit altered and shaped by) a continuum of mediated time and space.

• Consider artists like Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, William Yang – the

power, honesty and simplicity of direct address (Black journal #4). Script Meeting with Brad (20/5/05): The American Woman and the Father are what the Australian Woman doesn’t have – she presses ideas and relationships into her service and changes them and herself (paraphrasing Robert Frost). Ideas are not about intimacy, the American Woman provides the friendship that extends the reach of the Australian Woman. Re: Bettelheim/Giacometti etc….the useless struggle, how we seek meaning through the larger things that sits outside of ourself…spiritual domain/through art and science. Peter Fuller’s The Consolation of Lost Illusions. That the only certainty is uncertainty. That rationality demands that we solve it, but ultimately you have to make a leap of faith (paraphrasing Kierkeegaard) in friendship/intimacy. Letting go of the desire to find a rational explanation. I want rationality to work through the telling of anecdote e.g., Bettelheim’s ‘Joey’ or Giacometti and ‘the head that can’t be drawn’, monologues that tell a story, but let the audience find the connections between them. A complicated story that ends in friendship. My friendship with Amantha which has been sustained across time and space is the metaphor for it all.

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Take personal links from Amantha’s story and use them as points of connectivity e.g., Father’s head in profile on one screen, Giacometti’s head on another My relationship with Amantha nourishes my desire to be connected to something larger, will do this more than Heisenberg et al Amantha’s idea that – how she changes her father, her father changes her, she changes me – that’s a connection to the ideas I’m exploring. Distribution is absolutely inherent – in 2005 we are riddled with psycho-babble and the scientific – where does meaning lie? It lies in the gesture of a friend, Amantha’s relationship with her dead mother… Find connections between the two stories e.g., the smell of frangipani in Amantha’s story and smell in my memory (Black Journal #4). Telephone Conversation with Amantha (25/5/05):

• Miranda is a silhouette because she’s an observer, she’s looking in on the story and she’s experimenting with it.

• Amantha is looking for the truth of her mother, what you can’t know, ultimately theories are constantly disproved.

• Damen’s idea that something expands or transports their space so they can be who they really are. (Black Journal #4)

Script Meeting with Brad (27/5/05): There are recurring images of picking/shedding/tearing to uncover e.g., pinhole, moon tearing a hole, exposure – “to be naked and defenceless” (Travers quoted by Lawson, 1999, p.xviii), picking to let light in, to uncover reality. Finally leading to self-revelation. – ‘this is who I am!’ Tearing holes, opening spaces and when you open it it’s not what it seems. Leah Sc 1: alone/even the horizon isn’t reliable. Leah Sc 2: Intro of American Woman Leah Sc 3: moon scoffing Leah Sc 4: hiding/revealing/things transforming/things not being what they seem There are parallels between Leah and Amantha’s story – same journey, Leah’s on a cosmological level, Amantha’s on a small and intimate scale. Amantha is basing a search for truth around a canonical text (her mother’s story), Leah is basing a search for truth on cosmological texts. Observer effecting the outcome is shared by both of us i.e., my story talks about Heisenberg, whereas Miranda talks about effecting the outcome, she enacts it as a possibility. The theme of both stories should align i.e., the quest for truth which is, in the end, frustrated, you can’t know it. Friendship and taking care of each other is the only

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truth. Both stories need to do the same work differently, to echo, to counterpoint, to recur. Distribution is about the de-authority of place, where is she (American Woman, Miranda, Blonde Woman) – Mexico, New York, next door? Distributed location = fluidity of time and space; destabilisation of space = one of my central arguments. Scene 4 is a poetic revelation, not an about turn, an interruption. Re: Frost paraphrase, ‘if you press something into service you press it out of shape’, aligns with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. (Check out his poem Self-Seeker) See Deleuze and Guattari quote re: ‘tearing fabrics in the sky’ quoted by Nicole Bourke Creative Writing presentation to research methods (Black Journal #4). Telephone Conversation with Amantha Re: Script Mix (17/6/2005):

• Both characters are frustrated by not finding the ‘truth’ – but come to terms with their own story as a functional truth or their own ‘non-truth’

• Hamacas exist to protect you from the scorpions, at the end when the characters meet in the hamacas, there is some symbolism in what they represent. They could also be read as cocoons, as a chance for rebirth.

• I need to clarify the central dilemma of each section and this will help to drive the final monologue/section.

• Starting with the Uncertainty Principle and building on the tangents = to a kind of demonstration of autism (Black Journal #4).

Telephone Conversation with Amantha 4(/8/2005):

• The Blonde Woman represents the person actually experiencing, she is an embodiment of Miranda’s memory of the stories told to her. She is also the version of the Female Voice that the Mayans and Gabriel see.

• Blonde Woman’s manifestation as Jean Harlow connects to the line about Miranda’s mother “losing a grip on herself”, on her image of herself. It also connects to what the Female Voice says about living at light speed/as light i.e., as something beautiful but untouchable, something that doesn’t suffer loneliness or boredom or frustration. Another thing making the Female Voice light/light speed is the fact of her death/absence/distance.

• Miranda is the ruler of the experiment/almost non-theatrical/documentary/ slide show – she’s responsible for everything, she’s making it happen. Her “work” is based on those who beam numbers into space looking to communicate with other beings. She is certain that if she finds a pattern, there will be a truth (Black Journal #4).

Pari Journal, Italy (October 2005) – (Black Journal #5): “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past…” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets) Notes from “Art, Science and the Sacred” Workshop with F. David Peat:

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Sculptor Anish Kapoor: ‘oneness is unknowable – it cannot be known by the intellect’ Rumi: ‘there is no inside and outside, there is only inside’ Arabie: ‘if there is a oneness, why is there a multiplicity?’ Photographer Linda Connor: each image retains a remembrance of previous ones (could be useful for video) There is an 83 year old performance poet here called Trudy, she spoke this morning about ‘the path of wisdom’. After you have lived in family, made family etc., you cross over into seeking wisdom on a solo path. Regarding the problem of mixing mythos and logos (Plato talks about this distinction, but also does it). Alternative to this binary is the net (NB: Indra’s net) – internet. In Lifton’s The Protean Self he writes about those who experienced Hiroshima and who sought to remove nationalism/ethnic identity in order to survive as a species Boris Cyrulnik’s (French neurologist) research on children and resiliency – one ingredient of resilience is someone who believes in you = resiliency tutor (could also be a person or a book or film) – ‘the person who opens a door for you need not necessarily cross that threshold with you’ Prolepsis – ‘a piece of the future that reveals itself today – to live towards the future – looking for proleptic experiences – a way of turning things on their head’ (Whitehead and Bohm) Bohm said – two ways to do physics (to know about nature) – one was in a lab – the other way to look inside self, because body is made of the same stuff. Bohm talked to Einstein about this – he said when working on unified field theory he would squeeze a ball with his hand – the feeling/connection in his arm helped Bohm read Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti (the latter with whom he had a long relationship), at the end of his life he suffered serious depression and he had shock therapy in his 80s – he said ‘the flavour of depression never really left him’. When he gave a lecture he felt filled with light and in direct connection with everyone in the room – after which he would fall into major depression: ‘I can’t keep the stars at rest’ Bohm – “the observer is the observed” / Krishnamurti – “the thinker is the thought” Bohr – ordinary language imports ideas that don’t apply in the quantum world. There’s a limit to how we can talk about the quantum world (almost a Zen-like limit that Bohr arrives at – similar to Wittgenstein (‘what you can and cannot talk about’) Pauli – recognised that physics was using a ‘will to power’ and that we should study nature to study ourselves

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Bohm says – if he could come up with an order to explain Cezanne’s paintings he could come up with a theory to connect relativity and Quantum Mechanics Bohm’s Implicate Order (the order of infolded objects). Explicate Order (space and time, mind and matter) – each part contains the whole / within each part is enfolded the whole, everything is connected, even distant events. The Implicate Order doesn’t know itself – only the observer. Bohm thought that beyond the Implicate Order there were more and more levels of quantum and so it could not be integrated (i.e., what Einstein was trying to do). Once the electron reaches its destination it dies, it becomes fodder for the next one or fodder in the field – ‘what is lost is never fully lost’. Nicholas da Cusa – you can only know God by what he is not, the maximum thing and the minimum thing (via negative) – Complementarity. Bohm’s depression meant that he also questioned everything because if it changed how could he hold the stars up in the sky? Bohm devotes his life to wholeness, but as a person he was never able to achieve this, his life was in many compartments. He believed that if he could stop thinking he could change his mind (this from Krishnamurti) Jung – in each of us God placed a question. Our meaning is to find that question. That is our individuality. Synchronicity – meeting with self occurs when we are near the path of individuation:

1. a meaningful coincidence 2. creates an emotional response 3. has to transform/initiate something new in psyche 4. occurs in a chaotic, in-between time of transition

Collective unconscious – a field not influenced by time and space, needs a time and space to unfold. Means we have already lived this life, but this time we are here to ask why’ ‘A story is a question in motion’ / ‘We are not constructing ourselves alone we are the product of all our meetings’ Shadow – all the things I must drop to be myself ‘All our life we are climbing buildings only to realise we are climbing the wrong buildings’ What is lost is never fully lost, we lose the form, but not the thing/idea i.e., the same person may not return – we need imagination to find the new form, we need to detach from the old form, depression is related to staying in the present with something from the past That the internet distorts our perception of time, makes it seem slower than it is

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Complementarity doesn’t resolve tension, Bohm says to solve the tension would be to dissipate the energy (Black Journal #5). Writer’s Meeting - Leah and Amantha in Brooklyn – (31/10/05) – (Black Journal #4):

• Trace how the emotional and the physics relate to each other in every single scene.

• Why Physics? – it’s something to follow/something to use to work out, to look for beauty, to attach meaning to in order to carry on (Black Journal #4).

Writing Session - in Brooklyn – (31/10/05): What am I working with? SPACE – of body (“a bit of the world I happen to be inside” Antony Gormley)

- inner space/of self (Bohm said there are two ways to do physics and the second way is to look inside yourself because your body is made of the same stuff as nature. Also Pauli said” “we should study nature to study ourselves”). Because space expands, everyone everywhere is at the centre of the Big Bang.

- as a container - between things - camera obscura, inviting the audience into her created space (perhaps live

footage of live audience?) TIME – present, but always out of reach, yet it’s the only place to live

- something from the future pulls you forward LIGHT- s.o.l. is constant, otherwise everything would fall.

- illuminator – she’s beginning to ‘get it!’ - Conan – perhaps each image contains a remembrance of the previous (jo-hya-

ku) COMPLEMENTARITY – what is unknowable

- 2 versions of self - Monologue “Here I am reminded” from Pari notebook - Alternative to binary thinking / Indra’s net / the internet / a net / resilience

network - Bohr’s plasma theory – “…by joining into the collective the individual

becomes freer” - Bohr (or is it Bohm) holding the stars up in the sky i.e., speaking / engaging

kept him connected, kept the stars up in the sky - That experience requires more than one description. - Re: the theory of everything = the need to resolve tension. Bohm says

dissolving the tension would dissipate the energy WHY PHYSICS? – because it’s the scientific is the paradigm most present to us Set up the entire DaVinci quote in the first scene in order to subvert it at the end.

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Maybe older Australian Woman can be born from the hamaca at the beginning of Scene 4 and younger Australian Woman can return to it at the end during the frangipani monologue? (Black Journal #4). Journal Entry – Brooklyn – (1/11/05): Dramaturgy – also happens differently when we have physical proximity, that we can come at literally from different physical locations in the apartment, over real time spent together – using/mining autobiography to provide framework/structure … similarly the writing happens in different physical and actual locations, times of days, moods, phases (Black Journal #4). Telephone Conversation with Amantha (17/11/05):

• I think the Narrator should also be born from one of the hammocks, she becomes the pulse of both stories, tucks the Blonde Woman in with the Australian Woman at he end?

• Miranda should control the video, everything with the exception of the light speed stuff, she gestures for things to happen, either she knows when to turn to screen or she responds/interacts with screen, the screen is her acting partner.

• Leah – use some of Amantha’s images e.g., a patch of sunlight filter it into

Narrator’s text

• Watch film noir to inform Gabriel and Blonde Woman (Black Journal #4). Telephone Conversation with Amantha (24/11/05):

• Narrator could shadow Miranda e.g., similar gestures that connect them • Q: What is Narrator’s relationship to Miranda? A: Narrator is Miranda’s

mother if she had of still been alive • Narrator relates to Cixous’ preface (Black Journal #4).

Telephone Conversation with Amantha (30/11/05): Her response to my latest draft:

• I can be more direct in what I’m trying to say in the stage directions (let the reader know what it stands for)

• Scene 4 still needs denouement with American Woman, she’s doing a lot of giving, Australian Woman needs to acknowledge that (that will help DaVinci quote) … possibly “the thing the two of us equal” i.e., that she belongs to American Woman and vice versa in final Narrator’s text

• “What do you mean when you say: every time something is uttered its opposite appears?” I mean that every happiness is based on its fleetingness, every suffering will cause a joy somewhere down the line (Black Journal #4).

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Rehearsal Journal (26/2/06) – (Black Journal #6): I’m at the end of the 2-week intensive rehearsal period that opened these rehearsals. On the whole it has been a highly productive experience where the input of all involved has enabled the work to advance 100-fold. Focused energy will do that! In rehearsal my usual feeling of being under-prepared has pretty much evaporated as soon as I get on the floor. I know this material! Even Amantha’s which I felt less inside of at the beginning is really flowing in the space! I think the fact that I’m also familiar with her style, having directed Inner, City at CalArts is also coming into play. My overwhelming feeling has been that all these ideas and images which have been swimming around in my head and between Amantha and I for the last 5 years or so, are finally getting a chance for expression and bringing them into contact with others (designers, performers) has made them flourish and flow. Doing the movement workshop with Stace has been a great way to get the performers thinking with their bodies and I really feel that it has established a common vocabulary and a way to externally solve internal issues with and between characters. Those moments where things have got difficult or feel stuck are often because we’ve been trying to find a naturalistic or direct solution, whereas those moments when solutions are found are often when we’re working from the outside in and/or when we really work with what the technology’s offering us, e.g., allowing the silhouettes to interact, imagining the footage as a character, moving the revolve, interacting with the set. The other major development of the last couple of weeks has been the creation and introduction of the media e.g., the recording of the Female Voice, the filming of the Two Little Girls, the arrival of the Father footage, the filming of the Australian Woman in her own (i.e., the performer’s) bedroom and in the city and the Harlow footage. By making this media and then introducing it into the rehearsal room the sens of the many spaces, times and lights that the work contains/maintains is beginning to become apparent. The landscape of space/time/light/sound/character/body/avatar is multiple, many within the one that will be at the Loft when the performance occurs. The sense of opening out is palpable and will only get more so as more media is added and the live time zone issues that will arise with the webcast American Woman are also taken into account. There is a sense of multiple rehearsals taking part at once i.e., between Life as Light and The Uncertainty Principle and then within them as I focus in on the Female Voice, or the sections to be filmed, then alter this focus to how the live performers will interact with this media. There has been a sense of creating in layers e.g., we started working closely on the Female Voice and all characters in relation to her, to what would ultimately just be the sound of her. The first week (before the Female Voice was recorded) was about her accent and intention, the second week (once the recording was brought into the space) has been about how the Blonde Woman and others physically interact/respond to the sound of her (Black Journal #6). Rehearsal Journal – Tech Trial in the Loft (27/2/06): Each of the mediated spaces brings with it a different genre/feel…you have a certain tone that you establish with the live performance that will be totally interrupted by the mediated spaces (Black Journal #6).

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Rehearsal Journal (March 2006): Miranda – talking to her dad is journalistic, she knows these things a million times over. Silhouette – because she is a manipulator, because she’s in control of the experiment. When she says “Daddy I’m on stage” she is acknowledging the performance of it Australian Woman – trapped, standing still, needs to learn how to walk again Narrator – letting go of ego, being in touch with the universal rather than the reverse. Gabriel – she (the Blonde Woman) has made him the ‘perfect man’ Discoveries made with Blonde Woman and Gabriel dancing while being lit by Miranda: she can create separation between them, blur their edges, make their silhouettes kiss, when they have their backs to us their shadows are merged, Miranda can move them onto the wall and onto the audience, Miranda can put her own shadow into the image, she can ‘touch’ her mother this way, the light can flow or be chaotic, the light can focus on their body parts and Miranda can make them respond this way Miranda begins by presenting data (a presentational quality to her) but as the implications of the data sink in her style/tone changes – same for Father. Note how she changes according to who she’s interacting with. In the opening scene the Australian Woman is reciting mantra / willing herself into space / void of anything = rumble, universe, horizon / she reaches up, universe stops, horizon moves to centre, she steps back it goes to floor level, she looks along its length, chooses a direction and starts to walk along it / it flickers, she is off-balance, she looks down, horizon is gone, she falls / darkness / narrator / lx up on Australian Woman in same position / she goes to window. Long improvisation tracing the entire trajectory of Australian Woman within the piece: FINDINGS: @ beginning feelings of frustration and anger, more difficult to escape…plane scene is a turning point for the character. At the beginning she’s trying to make connections, to grab onto something, but there’s nothing to hold onto. She’s comfortable inside her room, outside box, uncomfortable, wanted to go back inside; Jumping back inside box….empty…..TWO LITTLE GIRLS…the only thing she has to deal with, its overpowering, it’s the biggest thing there. “Chinese Story of Time” is the Australian Woman saying “I have to deal with it”, this movement sequence is her wresting with Anna. Narrator – stillness, because of technology and it feels like it’s all happening in one moment. Her first words give words to the image before us. When she moves into Australian Woman’s box she crosses space/time Why do Narrator and American woman share the story of the star…because once you know something suddenly it’s everywhere, you see it everywhere…shared communal knowledge. (Black Journal #6).

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Telephone conversation with Amantha (14/3/06): Answering questions about Miranda’s text: “desperately researched” refers to “project despair” – her research was desperate / researching her despair desperately “the truth is in the numbers” – that’s the moment of realisation e.g., there’s still a truth of who her mother was but she can’t add it up. She has memories of her mother, feelings like her mother BUT who she actually was is outside all of that. Miranda romanticises the story, finds it amazing that her parents did this – it’s part of her personal mythology The story of the Makech – is Miranda’s piece of evidence of passion between her parents and that her mother was blending Gabriel / Father – “whoever he was, if he even existed” – to make clear that the story is suspect “How long have I been moving like this” = moving to Australia / How long have I kept going with you dead? / Going forward from that point? / being successful, emotionally integrated and functional / how did I get to be stronger when you’re the mother and I’m the child? / How did I get to be older and wiser? (Black Journal #6). Rehearsal Journal (con’t): Hanna (Miranda) working with the orange womb projected image – through her interaction, through the physical stuff she was doing her voice changed. Here the technology is prompting her rather than the other way around, it prompts her memory / reminiscing, same with marionette video and video of camels. In Robert’s music for the “Chinese Story of Time” each instrument is in pairs, they shift in and out of time with each other. The instruments include some text of the Australian Woman, cello, piano, plucked strings, harp, bas clarinet, xylophone, brass bank – plucking is out of phase, it slowly catches up with itself. Working in recording studio with Robert and Erica (also Emily last week), after the actors leave we create Frankenstein hybrids of different takes – wanting to catch the changeability of a moment repeated at different times, in different takes and/or to add or remove a beat to change the distance, the space between thoughts – capturing the multiple different instances of our rapidly changing mindsets…creating a new reality, a new time – from that patchwork of times. For the performers working in this way they are capturing versions of character in time (at a point within the process) and in the case of Erica tying the aural performance with a video performance / or in the case of Emily tying an aural performance that she uses as the soundtrack to her live performance and Hanna working with set acting partner. Also Erica working / performing in different spaces…in her bedroom, her own personal space (overlapping actor and character) and in the city – a kind of performance of everyday life – capturing those spaces and times and taking them into the time of live show (Black Journal #6).

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Rehearsal Journal (March 2006) – (Black Journal #7): Miranda, especially in the first monologue uses technology to expand her version of herself, to make herself more powerful, hence the single silhouette is more vulnerable, intimate and when the numbers are projected inside her silhouette she needs to let her interaction with technology inform what she’s saying NOT overwhelm. During her “I’m leaving New York” monologue the Australian Woman becomes present (in the present) for the first time and that cracks her open to a kind of innocent, pre-Anna state. Discussed with Conan (video artist) regarding the fact that he’s used to working out the timing of his clips according to his own sense …. (have had this conversation previously with Robert about the music and him having to work to exact timings dictated by the actors) times like this I see how amazing it would have been to have had both of them (with full equipment) in every rehearsal, so they could edit/compose in the space with the actors. This is how Robert and I worked on Poppins, a much more organic process – (NB: combo of the organic and the technological!) Also every time a new piece of technology is added the possible associations for actors (and audience) grow exponentially. Coming at this point of the process it feels more difficult to choreograph these associations, you get to the point where you just have to let these things be – (e.g., the random possibilities that you’re opened up to when filming in the street and @ Erica’s) – guerrilla performance making – allowing for the randomness… How often is the Australian Woman physically in-between, teetering on the edge? (Black Journal #7). Tech/Dress Week Journal (April 2006): The Narrator uses her hand as a platform throughout (in shadow) and finally with the light in her hand at the end. In the final moments when she brings her hands together on “Anna” and “Miranda”, the Australian Woman can see what she couldn’t before (before it was out of the realm of her experience) e.g., scotoma A note to Erica that the emotional connection to the line “something in me cracks open” has to have momentum, has to be present beforehand in order to break through. This relates to ‘jo-ha-kyu’ and to Auslander and to Shlain’s note about how in light we always see a frozen image from the moment before. Perhaps the experience for the audience will just be about being present at some moments, not so concerned about linear understanding. The Narrator at the end with the light in her hand: we see her shadow behind her, she can never see it because when she turns it will move – she’s happy with her alone-ness. Equally the Australian Woman has to come to this realisation by the time she meets the Narrator NOT to fight with it – but co-exist and be enriched by it.

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The moment Miranda comes out at the end she’s very much in-between, in a liminal space – between technology and purely live – she’s still held by Female Voice and by slides and Father on web – but she’s very live Look for those moments when the technology prompts the actor vs. those that are self-ignited It’s clear that when Miranda emerges she is coming back into the womb, but this womb is just on the other side of the one she’s been in, but this time it’s one of her own making. For the live Australian Woman learning to work with video is about learning a piece of music / timing / rhythm – a technical thing, as well as the rest (Black Journal #7). Telephone Conversation with Amantha after Preview (April 2006): The fact that Amantha and William May (Father) weren’t rehearsed by me actually accentuates their other worldliness, they’re not necessarily in the same emotional space as the ‘live’, they seem emotionally disconnected to what’s going on in the live space, which is often the case when communicating via technology (Black Journal #7).

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Appendix Two:

The Physics Project work-in-progress script (Magdalena version)

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THE PHYSICS PROJECT –Stage #2 (Magdalena w-i-p) PRE-SHOW: [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE. IN U.S.: WEB-CAST] AMANTHA: Hi, my name is Amantha. I’m here in Brisbane, from New York. It took me 26 hours to get here. I left on Friday the 21st of March at 3 p.m. and I arrived on Sunday the 23rd at 8 a.m. In order to determine the exact amount of hours it took me to get here, I refused to change my watch as we travelled across time zones, from New York to California, to New Zealand, to Australia. And yet, 26 hours is not enough time to get me from the 21st to the 23rd. According to my watch, midnight on the 22nd occurred somewhere over Hawaii. 10½ hours later we crossed the international dateline. What happened to the other 13½ hours? I’m leaving Australia on April 28th at 7:30 p.m. and I get back April 28th at 5:30 p.m., so that means that I arrive before I leave. I arrive while I’m still here saying good bye. Even if I give back the two hours I gain going back, I’m still short 11 ½ hours. That’s a lot of time to let go of. But what I really want to know is where did all those hours go? Trying to keep track of what time it is in New York and what time it is in Brisbane is not easy. The thing that’s really strange is that even though it’s not the same time, sometimes not even the same day, it’s still the present. This show on Monday April the 14th at 10 a.m./12 noon is hooked up via video conferencing to an open rehearsal at a gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where it is Sunday April the 13th at 8 p.m./10 p.m. [INTRODUCTIONS of both casts]. This show is the result of a long distance friendship and working partnership which generates creative energy in two places at once and brings distant spaces together to share experience in an imaginary dimension. The connection between Leah and I, which started when our paths crossed in California has now become part of a matrix of connections between the Australian and American participants. It’s amazing to imagine how matter and energy have interacted to bridge time and space and bring us all, including you the audience, together to experience the present, right now. [Her cell phone rings.] PROLOGUE: [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – FIONA M. & DINAH PERFORM] She points the flashlight toward the sound. The phone stops. She relaxes. The phone rings again. She points the flashlight at it. The phone stops. She waits. The phone rings again. She points the flashlight at it. It stops. She waits. It rings again. She puts the flashlight on the ground pointing towards it. She almost picks it up, it stops ringing. FIONA M.: When I pick up the phone it is part of me and I use it without any separation between it and my hand. When I look at it and get interested in what it is and put it under a microscope, it becomes an object of study. I can do one or the other, but the effective doing of one obviously forecloses the effective doing of the other. I may make a decision and take an action or I may think about my motives and my peculiarities and my virtues and my faults and try to decide why I am doing what I am.

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SCENE ONE: The Physics Project or The Science of Identity [Lights out.] In the darkness the sounds of breathing are heard. The sounds overlap and one by one, the actors light themselves with a flashlight to reveal that they are each blowing up a balloon. A final flashlight reveals FIONA M. lying in bed, blowing up a balloon. She holds the balloon in her hand. FIONA M.: According to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, when space contracts, time, its complement dilates. FIONA M. lets the balloon deflate, while the others tie them up and release. She stands, traces the light across the space until it finds a rolling suitcase. FIONA M. pulls the suitcase very slowly across the floor while saying her next line, speeding up at the end. FIONA M.: Motion is closely connected to time. GRACE: Time is the true capital. She traces the light from two flashlights on the floor. FIONA M.: Newton said “Every body attracts every other body with a force proportional to the mass of each body.” VIDEO of JACK in his box, with the following text: JACK: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. FIONA M.: At light speed it is not possible to sneak up on the present because it is still the future. To think of now is too late; the moment is already past. (She plays a video of EVAN speeding. She finds a bandanna, puts it on ANNA 2 like a blindfold.) FIONA M: Quantum Mechanics is a framework for understanding the microscopic properties of the universe. ANNA 2: (With a video image of ANNA 1.) Subatomic particles can appear in places they have no right to be, including two places at once. FIONA M. shines the flashlight on the radio, turns it on. Bach plays. FIONA M.: In order to explain synchronicity in a scientific context, multi-dimensional space must exist. DINAH: Do you ever get the feeling that things were meant to happen? (Fade out Bach.) FIONA M.: We can talk about the physical mechanisms in living objects, [GRACE exits. FIONA M. uses the flashlight to draw DINAH into the space. FIONA M. looks at her but DINAH is not aware of FIONA M. With the flashlight FIONA M leads DINAH to sit by the radio] but we also need to understand how these mechanism

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affect our experiences of the world. Both methods of description are valuable, to give either up is to impoverish our understanding of life; but they are not things that one usually tries to do at the same time.8 SCENE TWO: Dinah’s Coincidence [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – DINAH & FIONA M. PERFORM. IN U.S: VIDEO – DINAH & FIONA M. PERFORM.] DINAH is listening to the radio. FIONA M. turns the dial, causing static. DINAH readjusts the dial. FIONA M./RADIO VOICE: …the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major, requested this evening by Anna… The music begins to play. DINAH sits up and looks at the radio. She listens for a while. FIONA M.: (whispers to audience) Synchronicity, according to Jung, is the experience of connected events that defy any link through causality, probability or random averaging. SCENE THREE: Two Annas at Once [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF SCENE; LIVE – ANNA 2 INTERACT. IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF SCENE; LIVE – ANNA 1 & EVAN INTERACT.] FIONA M.: Quantum Mechanics shows us that subatomic particles can appear in places they have no right to be, including two places at once. VIDEO: Enter ANNA 1 and 2. They walk in a square pattern. They repeat: ANNA 1 and 2: Subatomic particles can appear in places they have no right to be, including two places at once. EVAN’S VOICE: Anna! (ANNA 1’s head turns in the direction of his voice, but she keeps moving and speaking the line) EVAN’S VOICE: Anna! (ANNA 2’s head turns in the direction of his voice, but she keeps moving and speaking the line) EVAN: (enters the square pattern they are making) Anna! (ANNA 1 walks towards him, he grabs both her hands and they start to spin, getting faster and faster. ANNA 2 walks downstage.) Right now you’re in the past, present and future. ANNA 1: (stops spinning) How can I be in more than one place at a time? ANNA 2: How can I be in more than one place at a time? FIONA: (LIVE) How can she be in more than one place at a time? ANNA 1 joins ANNA 2 downstage. EVAN continues to revolve in slow motion. 8 Oppenhemier, 1964, pp.54-55.

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ANNA 1 & 2: (Text is divided between them.) There is an atom in a closed box that is divided by a partition into two equal compartments. The partition has a very small hole so that the atom can pass through it. / According to classical logic, the atom will be either in the left compartment or in the right compartment. There is no third possibility. / But there is some strange way, which totally defies description in words, / the same atom is, / at the same time,/ in both compartments. / Such a situation can’t be expressed in ordinary language / it is inexpressible. / It is an idea crazy beyond words. FIONA: Totally unlike large objects, particles at the atomic level exhibit a wave aspect as well as a particle aspect. These two aspects, which are contradictory and mutually exclusive in the everyday domain, are complementary in atomic phenomenon.9 SCENE FOUR: Dinah’s Coincidence II: Does coincidence have meaning? [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – DINAH & FIONA M. PERFORM. IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF SCENE.] DINAH presses her answering machine message. FIONA M’S VOICE: You have one new message. Message one. Hi, this is Anna from Disney World Travel – you have already won a trip to Florida Disney World. To collect your prize … (DINAH erases message). Message deleted. They change positions. The telephone rings as they walk. FIONA M.: (on her cell phone) Hey, when are you coming over? DINAH: (on her cell phone) Who is this? FIONA M.: It’s Anna. Who’s this? DINAH: It’s Dinah. FIONA M.: Sorry, wrong number. (She hangs up. They change positions.) DINAH: Hello. FIONA M.: (on phone) Is Anna there? DINAH: (hesitates) Sorry, you’ve got the wrong number. (They each hang up. They retrace the movement of the scene, while the telephone rings underneath.) FIONA M.: (to audience) In order to explain synchronicity in a scientific context, multi-dimensional space must exist. String theory describes subatomic matter as waves on strings vibrating throughout all ten dimensions, rather than as particles. A particle can only occupy one point of space at each moment of time, but a string can occupy a line in space at each moment of time.

9 Heisenberg quoted by French, 1985, p.32.

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SCENE FIVE: Time and Space Collide: Grace catches Jack [IN AUSTRALIA AND U.S.: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF SCENE.] FIONA M.: According to Newton, time and space are constant and separate, constantly separated, only light is the messenger between them. GRACE and JACK are seen in both countries on a pre-recorded video of the following scene. JACK is happily playing with a flashlight on his own. GRACE appears using her flashlight as if searching for something. Their flashlights attract each other. Eventually they discover each other physically in space. JACK: Every body attracts every other body with a force that is proportional to the mass of each body. GRACE: Time elapses slowly for individuals in motion. They move together in the same pattern the flashlights made a moment ago. FIONA M. then steps between them holding a mirror. GRACE shines her flashlight onto the mirror. A square of light appears around JACK’S head. His flashlight goes out. GRACE and JACK play with the box of light, laughing. FIONA tightens the square around JACK’S head. FIONA M.: Einstein’s teacher, Hermann Minkowski said “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows.” In other words, Newton was wrong. SCENE SIX: Dinah’s Coincidence III: Synchronicity Defies Causality [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – DINAH & FIONA M. PERFORM SCENE. IN U.S: PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF SCENE.] DINAH turns on the television. FIONA M. appears in the guise of a number of television heads. FIONA M.: (News anchor) Coming to us live now from Anchorage, Alaska, Anna Kriss. Anna, can you hear me? Anna? Can you hear me? DINAH changes the channel on the T.V. FIONA M.: (Book show host) Today on Bookchat, we’ll be talking about Anna Karenina… DINAH changes the channel on the T.V. FIONA M.: (Dog commercial) C’mon on Anna, c’mon. Good dog! DINAH changes the channel on the T.V. FIONA M.: (Cop show) We’ve got a body over by Anna’s Rice Shop… DINAH changes the channel on the T.V. FIONA M.: (Soap opera) Anna, no, don’t do it. Anna!!!!

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DINAH keeps changing the channel on the T.V., the sound goes down. FIONA M.: Synchronicities are manifestations in mind and matter of the unknown ground that underlies them both. SCENE SEVEN: The Restaurant According to Dinah: A Line Through Time [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION WITH EVAN & ANNA 1; LIVE – ANNA 2 & DINAH. IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION WITH ANNA 2 & DINAH; LIVE – ANNA 1 & EVAN.] EVAN and ANNA are fighting. EVAN: I do it to fuck with time. ANNA 2: I don’t like you when you do it EVAN: I think you do DINAH: Anna! ANNA 2: Dinah! (They hug) DINAH: I knew this was going to happen. It’s like that old story, remember that story, the one about the French boy and the soufflé a l’orange…well, there’s an old story about a little French boy, Pierre, whose elderly neighbour Martin Giroux once offered him a soufflé a l’orange, a dessert that was unheard of in his village. The little boy thought it was the most wonderful thing he had ever tasted. Ten years later Pierre came across another souffle a l’orange in a restaurant in Algiers but when he ordered it, he was told that it had already been requested by a Monsieur Martin Giroux. Then many years after that, Pierre was at a party in Paris when the host announced there would be souffle a l’orange as a special treat. While he was eating it Pierre said to a friend that the only thing missing was his old neighbour. At that exact moment the door opened and in walked this very very old man. It turned out to be the very same Martin Giroux who had got hold of the wrong address and come to the party by mistake.10 I’ve been hearing your name all over the place. EVAN: When I fuck with time you are my past, present and future. ANNA 2: Where are you taking me? DINAH spills water on ANNA 2. SCENE EIGHT: Time and Space Cohabit: Grace packs Jack [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – JACK; LIVE – GRACE. IN U.S: LIVE – JACK; VIDEO – GRACE’S HANDS PACKING; AUDIO – GRACE’S VOICE.] GRACE packs clocks in her suitcase. GRACE: Consider the familiar, old kind of wallet for holding money, with a slot for your dollar bills. Then imagine there’s another slot for your surroundings, your environment, nature, work. The third slot is for what exists inside you: your thoughts 10 Adapted from Peat, 1987, p.8.

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and feelings. Finally there is a slot for the people in your life. Since it isn’t possible to move things from one slot to another, dividing things up in this way may at first seem pointless. You can’t buy knowledge with money, you can’t replace human interaction with gadgets. But next to the wallet lies the symbol for the gold standard itself: time. Time can be moved to any of the slots. Time is the true capital.11 GRACE turns and the image of JACK appears in her suitcase. SCENE NINE: The Restaurant According to Anna: A Quantum Perspective [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION WITH EVAN & ANNA 1; LIVE – ANNA 2 & DINAH.

IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION WITH ANNA 2 & DINAH; LIVE – ANNA 1 & EVAN.] EVAN and ANNA 1 are fighting. In Australia, ANNA 2 can’t hear ANNA 1 or EVAN. In U.S., ANNA 1 can’t hear ANNA 2 or DINAH. EVAN: I do it to fuck with you. ANNA 1: I don’t like you when you do it EVAN: I think you do ANNA 2: (LIVE) I don’t like you when you do it. DINAH: Anna! ANNA 2: Dinah! (They hug) DINAH: I knew this was going to happen….it’s just like the story of the French boy and the soufflé a l’orange …I’ve been hearing your name all over the place. We were meant to be together. EVAN: When I fuck with you it’s your past, present and future. ANNA 2: Where are you taking me? [She spills water live.] ANNA 1 (LIVE): Where are you taking me? [She spills water.] SCENE TEN: Time Has It All Figured Out: Bedtime for Grace and Jack [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – JACK; LIVE – GRACE. IN U.S: LIVE – JACK CREEPING AROUND THE SPACE IN HIS BOX; VIDEO – GRACE] (GRACE is unpacking JACK and putting him to bed.) GRACE: Let’s say that you have a thirty-mile commute to work, so you drive sixty miles a day. This takes you about an hour. But does it really take one hour to drive sixty miles? Let’s do the arithmetic. In Sweden it costs approximately 20 dollars to drive 60 miles. You have to work to earn those 20 dollars. The average wage per hour, after taxes, is 5 dollars. That means it takes four hours to earn the money for the commute. So it doesn’t take one hour to drive sixty miles – it takes 1 + 4 hours,

11 Jonsson,2001, pp.3-4.

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or a total of five hours! Which results in an average speed of 12 miles per hour (60 miles in 5 hours). So you might as well ride your bike to work!12 JACK: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. GRACE: Goodnight! (She switches off the light.) SCENE ELEVEN: In The Cave, Before [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – ANNA 2 & DINAH PERFORM. IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF ANNA

2 & DINAH PERFORMING.]

ANNA 2 and DINAH are silhouetted as in an entranceway. ANNA 2 is blindfolded, as they enter DINAH holds two flashlights. ANNA 2: Where are you taking me? [They move into a dark space and settle together on the ground. DINAH hands ANNA a flashlight and removes her blindfold. With a flashlight each they explore the space.] DINAH: Do you ever get the feeling that things were meant to happen? [DINAH takes out a portable cassette player and starts to play Bach’s Prelude Cello Suite #1 in G Major.] The first time we met you told me you loved this piece of music. When I got home that night I went through my records and found a copy, I didn’t remember owning any Bach and I was sure I’d never heard it. Then I started reading the jacket and I noticed that the cellist was Jonathan Tinker, Tinker also played on my favorite Bartok piece. I sat down and played both records all the way through. When I was finished I turned the radio on and heard that Jonathan Tinker had died that very day. So you see, we were meant to be together. [ANNA moves away. DINAH shines her flashlight on ANNA’S face.] What’s the matter? ANNA 2: Some things can’t be expressed in ordinary language. [They move towards each other, just as they are about to kiss ANNA hesitates.] DINAH: Don’t fight it. [They move towards each other. Flashlights are aimed at the kiss and they freeze. ANNA 2 looks up from the kiss towards the source of the flashlight. DINAH stays frozen.] SCENE TWELVE: The Uncertainty Principle: Two Annas Consider One Future [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF SCENE; LIVE – ANNA 2 & DINAH. IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF SCENE; LIVE – ANNA 1 & EVAN.] In the video ANNA 1 is holding the flashlight on ANNA 2. ANNA 1: [Live ANNA 2 points her flashlight out in the cave, looking for something.] For every particle there exists an antiparticle with equal mass and opposite charge.13 [In the video ANNA 2 pushes ANNA 1 back to where DINAH is frozen.] If, in seeking to predict the future, you shine light on a particle, some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle, and this will indicate its position.

12 Jonsson, 2001, pp.6-7. 13 Capra, 1975, p.77.

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However even one quantum wave of light will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. ANNA 2: [Live, ANNA 1 shines her flashlight onto the frozen DINAH. In the video ANNA 2 grabs the flashlight and pushes ANNA 1 back to where EVAN is frozen.] If, in seeking to predict the future, you shine light on a particle, some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle, and this will indicate its position. However even one quantum wave of light will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. ANNA 1 & 2: [In fierce unison] You cannot predict the future. You can only predict different possible outcomes. Furthermore, subatomic particles can appear in places they have no right to be, including two places at once. ANNA 2: [LIVE to DINAH] You cannot predict the future. You can only predict different possible outcomes. SCENE THIRTEEN: Falling Through Space

[IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – GRACE RE-PACKS JACK’S TV HEAD; VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF

JACK.

IN U.S: LIVE – JACK. ] FIONA M.: Einstein said: “If a person falls freely, he won’t feel his own weight.” JACK and GRACE in bed. JACK wakes up, he is disturbed. JACK: I dreamt that I was falling. At least I thought I was. In my dream I was confined to a box from which I could not look out, and in which I could make only internal measurements. I felt a uniform acceleration. I couldn’t tell whether I was being sped up by some force acting directly on the box, or by a uniform gravitational field. I took out a pen and pad in order to write a few notes, but when I let go they stayed floating right by me.14 SCENE FOURTEEN: The Habit of Light Speed [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – EVAN & ANNA 1’S PRE-RECORDED VERSION; LIVE – ANNA 2 WITH WATER. IN

U.S: VIDEO – EVAN SPEEDING. LIVE – EVAN & ANNA 1 PERFORM.]

Live, FIONA M. pops a balloon. In the video EVAN stands behind restaurant table, he pours water onto the table, slowly at first, but gradually building up to a big gush. ANNA 1 sits next to him. The sound of a balloon popping. EVAN: When I achieve the speed of light, the space outside my frame of reference both ahead of me and behind merges so that the space I see is infinitely thin. Front and back as well as sides can be imagined to be “all here”. Whenever space contracts, time, its complement, dilates. To think of now is too late; the moment is already past. Nor is it possible to sneak up on the present, because it is still the future. [The water falls freely. EVAN and ANNA go under the table where the water is falling onto a reflected surface. They look at their reflections and plunge their hands in.] Only as a traveller approaches the speed of light does the frame we call the

14 Adapted from Oppenheimer, 1964, p.26.

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present begin to ooze, amoeba-like, over our ordinary temporal boundaries and spill into the past and the future.15 Which means the impossible isn’t. [The sound of a balloon popping in the video and performed live by FIONA M. She retrieves a note from inside the popped balloon and reads the title of the next scene.] SCENE FIFTEEN: Falling Through Space II

[IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF JACK; LIVE – GRACE PACKING CLOCKS.

IN U.S: LIVE – JACK, AS PER STAGE DIRECTIONS.] GRACE packs clocks. JACK: I am confined to a box from which I cannot look out, and in which I can make only internal measurements. I feel an acceleration, but I can’t tell whether I am being speeded up by some outside force, or whether I am falling. When you fall freely there seems to be no gravity and no acceleration. But I am in fact accelerating, and I am, in fact falling. SCENE SIXTEEN: In The Cave, Now [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION; LIVE – FIONA M. INTROS & ANNA 2 INTERACTS. IN

U.S: LIVE: EVAN & ANNA 1 PERFORM.]

FIONA M.: Past, present and future are persistent illusions. One person’s past could theoretically be another’s future. In the video EVAN is blindfolded, he and ANNA 1 are silhouetted as in an entranceway. Live, ANNA 2 with flashlight reflects the movement of the entrance into the cave. FIONA M. follows her in and uses a flashlight to light her from the perspective of EVAN.] EVAN: Where are you taking me? [They move into a dark space. ANNA 1 hands EVAN a flashlight and removes his blindfold. With a flashlight each they explore the space.] EVAN: I’m waiting for the subway, things don’t look right, I feel good. When the train comes it’s all squashed, like an accordion, it’s a flattened slab of metal one foot thick, barreling down the tracks and everyone inside is as thin as paper, frozen in time like statues. When the train stops it suddenly expands until the slab of metal fills the entire station. I get on the train, nothing moves. Then the station flies away. I see the next stop coming towards me, I see the platform and everyone standing on it is squeezed flat like an accordion, I get off on the train.16 [EVAN moves behind her, ANNA shines her flashlight on his face.] EVAN: Get that fucking thing outta my face! [Live, FIONA M. moves out of the scene, ANNA 2 walks towards the upstage restaurant TV and using her flashlight as a remote control turns the scene off at the end. In the video, EVAN grabs her hand, they struggle briefly, a challenge which ends playfully. ANNA 1 grabs EVAN’S chin, he nibbles her fingers.]

15 Adapted from Shlain, 1991, p.188. 16 Adapted from Kaku, 1995, pp.83-84.

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ANNA 1: Some things can’t be expressed in ordinary language. [They move towards each other, just as they are about to kiss ANNA pulls away.] EVAN: Don’t fight it. [They move towards each other. Flashlights freeze them in this position.] SCENE SEVENTEEN: Time Travelling [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – GRACE IS ROLLING JACK; VIDEO – JACK ON SCREEN.

IN U.S: LIVE – JACK PERFORMS; VIDEO– GRACE] In Australia GRACE carries a suitcase/television that shows JACK in his box. At some point during the text JACK knocks on the walls of his box, GRACE stops moving and talks directly to JACK. GRACE: Motion is closely connected to time. Absolute time does not exist. The relative rate of ticking of two clocks depends on their relative speed. If you and I synchronize our watches, I sit home and you go to the grocery store, or to Budapest or to the moon and back, your watch will read less than mine when you return. Less time will have elapsed for you. You will have aged less than me. This has been experimentally confirmed.17 JACK: If you speed up, you’ll just get there faster. SCENE EIGHTEEN: Checking In or The Expanding Universe [IN AUSTRALIAAND U.S.: LIVE/WEBCAST]

House lights come up. AMANTHA: How’s New York doing? [Ad lib.] FIONA M.: The Universe is expanding at the same rate everywhere: viewed from any other galaxy, the pattern of motion would be broadly the same. It is wrong to imagine, as many people do, that we are somehow at the centre of the expansion. Although the other galaxies are certainly moving away from us, they are also moving away from each other, and galaxies visible from any other galaxy appear to recede in much the same way that galaxies we can see appear to recede from us. No galaxy is in the privileged position of being at the centre of expansion.18 [Repeat from the end of scene seventeen.] JACK: If you speed up, you’ll just get there faster. SCENE NINETEEN: Falling Through Space III [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – JACK PERFORMS; LIVE – GRACE MOVES SUITCASE. IN U.S: LIVE – JACK.] In Australia GRACE is frantically moving her suitcase/television (which contains JACK’S image) around. In America, as the square of light gets larger, JACK appears to grow. Mid-way through the text the square begins to jerk haphazardly and JACK must follow it to stay contained with the square. 17 Lightman, 1992, p.11. 18 Davies and Gribbin, 1992, p.115.

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JACK: If you are moving in something resembling free space you really cannot tell how fast you are moving unless you refer your motion to something else. But if you are moving in a jerky way, being accelerated or slowed down, you can have all the blinds drawn, you cannot know where anything else in the world is, but you still can tell that something is going on and you can measure it. You do not have to define motion as it relates to something else because within the moving thing “this railroad car or elevator or rocket or box” you can tell by the way you feel that you are being pushed, pulled, hauled around, jerked, whatever it is. The elementary fact about accelerated motions is that we can tell whether we are being jerked around or not. SCENE TWENTY: 186,000 Miles Per Second [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION; LIVE – ANNA 2 INTERACTS.

IN U.S: LIVE – EVAN & ANNA 2 PERFORM; VIDEO – EVAN SPEEDING.] VIDEO: ANNA 1 sits downstage on a chair, she speaks her text quickly and rocks back and forth. EVAN crouches far upstage of her and speaks his text extremely slowly. When EVAN finishes the text, he snorts along the long line to ANNA 1, who inhales deeply as well. LIVE: ANNA 2 and FIONA M. are sitting at the restaurant table. ANNA 2 is tapping her fingers on the glass tabletop and bobbing her feet up and down. FIONA M. is lighting her hands and feet with two flashlights. ANNA 1: [Repeats.] To think of now is too late; the moment is already past. EVAN: To think of now is too late; the moment is already past. LIVE: Both ANNA 2 and FIONA M. stand. SCENE TWENTY-ONE: Time’s Worst Nightmare [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – GRACE PERFORMS; VIDEO – JACK’S PRE-RECORDED VERSION. IN U.S: LIVE – JACK PERFORMS; VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF GRACE.] In America JACK is in a box of light against the wall, with his head on a pillow and covered by a blanket. The voice of GRACE fills the space. JACK’S pre-recorded sleeping face is visible on a television next to GRACE who is in a bed in Australia that sits up against the back wall – she is standing facing the audience, asleep. GRACE’S monologue is spoken from a dream state. GRACE: In a lab in Bonn there’s a clock – or, rather, the clock. This and a network of similar ones across the world together constitute “the standard clock”. They are cesium-beam atomic clocks. They are continually monitored, compared, tweaked and refined into near-perfect step. At the international Bureau of Weights and Measures the data are collected, analyzed and broadcast to a time-obsessed world. So, as we go about our daily toil, the Bonn cesium-beam clock keeps the time, it is, a custodian of Earth time. The trouble is, the Earth itself doesn’t always keep good time. Occasionally our clocks, must be adjusted by a second to track changes in the Earth’s rotation rate. The last such “leap second” was added on 30 June 1994. In this age of high-precision timekeeping, poor old Earth doesn’t make the grade. Only an atomic clock, man-made and mysterious, serves to deliver with the precision demanded by navigators, astronomers and airline pilots. One second is no longer defined to be 1/86,400 of a day: it is 9,192,631,770 beats of a cesium atom. But whose time is the Bonn clock telling anyway? Your time? My time? God’s time? And when the Earth

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clock gets out of sync with the Bonn clock, which one is right? Well, presumably the Bonn clock, because it’s more accurate. But accurate relative to what? To us? After all, clocks were invented to tell the time for entirely human purposes. Are all humans “on” the same time, however?19 Towards the end of the monologue, JACK and GRACE engage in a struggle over who has the blanket. All of JACK’S actions take place in the monitor, all of GRACE’S are live in Australia. In America, JACK is up against the wall, with his head in the square of light, on a pillow, wrestling with a blanket. As she pulls the blanket back, they tug of war on the blanket. GRACE wins. JACK: No matter how often you check on the olives, they won’t ripen any faster. SCENE TWENTY-TWO: The Restaurant According to Evan: Astride A Beam Of Light [IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – EVAN IS WATCHING A VIDEO OF ANNA 2 & DINAH HUGGING. HE REWINDS & REPEATS; LIVE – FIONA M. INTROS. SCENE BETWEEN ANNA 2 & DINAH. THEY GREET, SIT DOWN AND HAVE A NORMAL CONVERSATION. IN U.S: VIDEO – ANNA 2 & DINAH HUGGING; LIVE – ANNA 1 REVOLVES AROUND EVAN WITH A LIGHT, WHILE HE WATCHES A VIDEO OF ANNA 2 & DINAH HUGGING. HE REWINDS & REPEATS; AUDIO – FIONA M’S INTRO.] FIONA: When an observer achieves the speed of light, the space outside his frame of reference both ahead of him and behind merges so that the space he sees is infinitely thin. DINAH: Anna! ANNA 1 & 2: Dinah! (Text repeated.) SCENE TWENTY-THREE: The Black Hole: When Space Has Had Enough [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – FIONA M. NARRATES, GRACE REACTS TO IMPLOSION, DISAPPEARS AND REAPPEARS IN PRE-RECORDED VIDEO; VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED SCENE OF JACK IMPLODING. IN U.S: LIVE – JACK PERFORMS IMPLOSION; VIDEO – FIONA M. NARRATES. PRE-RECORDED SCENE OF JACK IMPLODING.] GRACE is spinning her suitcase/television, they begin to orbit each other. JACK’S internal gravitational forces become stronger than her external gravitational forces, he implodes. GRACE falls towards him. As she gets closer to him she falls more and more slowly. Time stops. GRACE’S body appears to stretch. The walls of the room appear to stretch with him. JACK becomes a singularity. GRACE falls into him. The room returns to normal. GRACE is no longer visible onstage but she can be seen in the TV, distorted in such a way as a black hole would distort light around its event horizon. FIONA M. narrates: When a star’s internal gravitational forces become stronger than its external gravitational forces it implodes. The resulting absence of matter is a black hole. The tiny singularity that contains all the star’s previous mass creates a powerful gravitational field. To a body inside the event horizon of a black hole, time stops and matter stretches. The body seems to fall slower and slower, but it will

19 Davies, Paul, 1996, pp.21-22.

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inevitably slam into the dense mass at the center. Trying to avoid the singularity is like trying to avoid next Thursday. Nothing, not even light, can escape its power. SCENE TWENTY-FOUR: 186,000 Miles Per Second Is Not For Everyone

[IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED SCENE BETWEEN EVAN & ANNA 1; LIVE – ANNA 2

INTERACTS. IN U.S: VIDEO – EVAN SPEEDING; LIVE – EVAN & ANNA 1 PERFORM.]

LIVE: ANNA 2 is against the back wall. FIONA M. walks towards her with a flashlight on her. When she gets close enough, they exchange flashlights and positions. VIDEO: ANNA 1 is against the back wall. EVAN shines a flashlight on her. He gets closer and closer, narrowing the spot of light as he does. When he is very close, he throws the flashlight to her. She catches it and turns it on him. She backs him into the wall with the light, when the light becomes unbearable, he yells: EVAN: Get that fucking thing outta my fucking face! ANNA 1 disappears. The lights come on. EVAN begins a rhythmic pattern of gestures: 1: Bringing watch up to face – without looking at it. He whistles. 2: Tapping foot. 3: Hand tapping change in pocket (in counter-rhythm to 2). 4: Sucks teeth. 5: Head tilt back and forth to one side. He stops all except #3 EVAN: If I don’t do it someone else will. He takes a balloon out of his pocket and blows it up until it bursts. At the moment it bursts he is propelled forward from the wall. His movement gradually slows down until he is moving in extreme slow motion. His path is a curve in front of the audience as he gets closer to the wall (going backwards), he gets faster. The moment he hits the back wall we hear the sound of a balloon bursting. He returns to tapping the change in his pocket. SCENE TWENTY-FIVE: Matter Transforms to Energy or If I don’t do it someone else will. [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – FIONA M. PERFORMS; VIDEO. U.S: VIDEO – FIONA M. PERFORMS. 2ND VIDEO.] LIVE: FIONA M. puts a lit match to a balloon, it pops. She strikes a match and lights six candles. VIDEO: FIONA M. lights candles during the scene, as she does images from each of the characters are superimposed over her image. FIONA M.: During fission, a nucleus splits into fragments. If the process is controlled you have nuclear power. If it is uncontrolled, you have a nuclear weapon.

1. The explosive surrounding the fissile material is ignited. 2. A compressional shock wave moves inward, increasing in pressure,

impinging on all points of the bomb core at the same instant.

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3. As the core density increases, the mass becomes critical, then supercritical. 4. The initiator is released, producing many neutrons, and a chain reaction

begins 5. The internal pressure exceeds the implosion pressure. 6. As the bomb disassembles, the energy released in the fission process is

transferred to the surroundings. LIVE: Video pauses on image of burning candles. The other characters come forward to FIONA M., and light a candle from her source. By the end of the following text, they blow them out. FIONA M.: [VIDEO – fast forwards images from throughout the show so far.] At the moment the universe was born there was a colossal explosion that scientists refer to as “the big bang”. This marked the birth of time and space. Following the super temperatures of the big bang, the universe gradually cooled down. Photons ceased to interact with electrons, permitting them to produce light directly, eliminating radiation, making the universe transparent. This is sometimes referred to as the clearing of the universe. [FIONA M., is the last to blow out her candle.] SCENE TWENTY-SIX: The White Hole: Space and Time Become Space-Time [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – FIONA M. NARRATES. VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF JACK & GRACE. IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF JACK & GRACE WITH FIONA M’S NARRATION. WEB-CASTING: JACK & GRACE MAKE CONTACT.] The black hole effect is seen on the video. GRACE and JACK appear in the video, floating around the black hole. FIONA M.: If a black hole can only suck things in, a white hole, in theory, could only spit things out. You could fall through a black hole and pop out of a white hole that is very far away from the black hole, maybe even in a different Universe. The exit could lie in the past so that you could travel back in time. [GRACE and JACK come together in the video and repeat their earlier meeting of flashlights.] GRACE: Space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. This new reality is a physical entity known as Space-Time. A few moments where GRACE and JACK play together on the video in outer space. JACK: Gravity is not a force, objects bend space-time. Imagine the impression we make by standing in the middle of a trampoline, roll a ball across the trampoline’s surface, and it is redirected by the “valley” that we’ve made. GRACE: Space doesn’t exist independent of time, together space and time make up the four dimensional arena in which all things exist. FIONA: Einstein said: “Gravitation cannot be held accountable for two people falling in love.” SCENE TWENTY-SEVEN: In The Cave, Before, Backwards [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – ANNA 2 & DINAH PERFORM. IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION OF ANNA 2 & DINAH; LIVE – ANNA 1 MIRRORS ANNA 2’S MOVEMENTS.]

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FIONA M. turns on the radio, Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major is playing backwards. ANNA 2 and DINAH are frozen in the about-to-kiss position, they move away from each other. DINAH: Don’t fight it. ANNA 2 moves towards DINAH, they are about to kiss, but they both pull away from each other. ANNA: Some things can’t be expressed in ordinary language. [DINAH shines her flashlight onto ANNA’S face.] DINAH: What’s the matter? We weren’t meant to be together. I heard on the radio that Jonathan Tinker died, he was the cellist on that Bach piece you like. I wanted to hear it again, I could have sworn I had a copy, I went home and looked for it, but I couldn’t find it. I guess I never had it. I wanted to play it for you. You would have loved that. Do you ever get the feeling that some things weren’t meant to happen? [ANNA moves away from her. With a flashlight each they explore the space. DINAH puts the blindfold on ANNA’S face. They move to the entranceway.] ANNA: [DINAH walks away, taking both flashlights. ANNA 1 who is still in the corner with a flashlight from her previous scene, shines the light on ANNA 2. LIVE: FIONA M. directs her flashlight at ANNA.] Where are you taking me? SCENE TWENTY-EIGHT: The Determined Universe

[IN AUSTRALIA: VIDEO – STILL IMAGE OF EVAN & ANNA 1. LIVE – ANNA 2 & FIONA M. PERFORM.

IN U.S: VIDEO – PRE-RECORDED VERSION; LIVE – ANNA 1 & EVAN PERFORM.]

FIONA M.: [Shining flashlight on ANNA 2] Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all forces controlling nature along with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. ANNA 2: [Taking the flashlight off her.] If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it nothing would be uncertain. The future and the past would be equally present to its eyes.20 SCENE TWENTY-NINE: [IN AUSTRALIA & U.S: PRE-RECORDED VERSION. 1ST INTERACTION BETWEEN FIONA M. & DINAH IS LIVE IN AUSTRALIA AND PRE-RECORDED IN U.S.] FIONA M.’s cell phone rings. She looks at it, then answers. FIONA M.: Hello? Yes, I’m coming. I’ll meet you there. DINAH is sitting at the restaurant table reading a physics book. FIONA M. hands her a flashlight.

20 Davies and Gribbin, 1992, p.115.

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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.21 DINAH: [To the audience] The Physics Project: The Science of Participation FIONA M. exits the Australian playing space. DINAH turns on a television and watches the following. JACK, GRACE, EVAN, ANNA 1, ANNA 2, and FIONA M. are in a cinema together. The others eat FIONA M.’S popcorn. FIONA M.: We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here we are, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch thick slab of plate glass, but we learnt from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron we have to shatter that plate glass; we have to reach in there. So the old word observer simply has to be crossed off the books, and we must put in the new word participator. In this way we’ve come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.22 SCENE THIRTY: A Theory of Everything: The Elegant Universe of Identity [IN AUSTRALIA: LIVE – DINAH, GRACE & ANNA 2 PERFORM ACTIONS WITH FLASHLIGHT; VIDEO - FOOTAGE OF PEOPLE IN THE STREETS. IN U.S: LIVE – JACK, EVAN & ANNA 1 PERFORM ACTIONS WITH FLASHLIGHTS; VIDEO – FOOTAGE OF PEOPLE IN THE STREETS; AUDIO – DINAH’S VOICE.] DINAH takes a flashlight and moves her arm in an arc, her breath becomes rhythmic and audible, at the end of each arc of movement a new person joins, moving and breathing, building the sound and the image of figures. When everyone has joined, DINAH speaks, the video begins to play and the figures keep moving silently. DINAH: The essence of string theory is that it can explain the nature of both matter and space-time – that‘s like describing marble and air with one word. 23 Why should we have one set of laws for large things and another set when things are small? According to string theory, the marriage of the large and small is not only happy, but inevitable. So, as you move through the four familiar extended dimensions, you also touch six tiny dimensions, tightly curled-up. They exist everywhere and as you move you circumnavigate them an enormous number of times. You are completely unaware of the journey you took through the curled-up dimensions.24 At the end of the text, the breathing resumes and the Bach music can be heard. Gradually the movement and breathing stops person by person.

The End.

21 Heisenberg, 1990, p.58. 22 Wheeler quoted in Buckley and Peat, 1996, pp.90-91. 23 Kaku, 1995, p.152. 24 Greene, 2000, p.4, p.208.

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Appendix Three:

The Physics Project script (Loft version)

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The Physics Project – REHEARSAL DRAFT 9th March 2006 By Amantha May & Leah Mercer (s/w/itches)

The Physics Project is made up of two separate but interwoven stories, The Uncertainty Principle and Life as Light. The Uncertainty Principle AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: A woman in her 20s, a loner, looking for common ground. NARRATOR: An older version of the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN, her future calling her forward. When she appears in Life as Light it is as if she is MIRANDA’S mother had she still been alive. AMERICAN WOMAN (Webcast only): A long-distance friend of the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN. TWO LITTLE GIRLS (Still image, video & sound only): The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN as a girl and her best friend. Life as Light MIRANDA: An American woman living in Australia. FEMALE VOICE/BLONDE WOMAN/JEAN HARLOW: As HARLOW she wears a wave wig and looks convincing as a 30s black and white film star. As the BLONDE WOMAN she wears another blonde wig and speaks with an American accent. GABRIEL: A Mexican of Mayan descent, compelling and confident. DADDY (Video only): Miranda’s American father. ©2006 held by authors

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The Uncertainty Principle - SCENE 1: Space Inside a black box space the following text prints out onto a giant screen: “IF YOU ARE ALONE YOU BELONG ENTIRELY TO YOURSELF…IF YOU ARE ACCOMPANIED BY EVEN ONE COMPANION YOU BELONG ONLY HALF TO YOURSELF…AND IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE COMPANION YOU WILL FALL MORE DEEPLY INTO THE SAME PLIGHT” (Leonardo da Vinci) The text disappears and a sound is heard, it could be the sea, wind or the sound of a jet passing overhead. A lit horizon traverses the stage. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN is on a platform of absolute rest. It is as if she is the only person on earth. She is standing straight and absolutely still. Her figure vertically intersects with the horizon, creating a right angle. All around her projected images of the universe are in motion, e.g., planets, moons, stars etc. The first section of the projected text reappears above the horizon: “IF YOU ARE ALONE YOU BELONG ENTIRELY TO YOURSELF” NARRATOR (dimly perceivable upstage swinging in a hamaca): Picture this, a story about a woman, a small woman who lives alone in a big country. At the edge of this country, which is at the edge of the world, this small woman feels that she exists in an ether, upon a platform of absolute rest, a constant place where she alone holds all the stars up in the sky. In the following section every time the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN moves the images stop and every time she stops the images move again. She repeats this a few times. The images change to the things of the world, e.g., people, car, cities, the images move faster. The woman seems tiny in comparison to the space created by the moving images. The following two things happen simultaneously: 1. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN reaches out and up towards the horizon, grabs hold, swings herself on top of it and begins to walk along it. As she walks along it, the horizon starts to flicker off and on until finally it goes out. The woman drops to the floor. The room is pitch black and there is silence. 2. Live text NARRATOR: The story of how she fell from her platform of absolute rest, how she learnt to fill the space between, with something other than

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ether and still keep the stars from falling from the sky, took a lifetime of living, but can be told in no time at all. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN goes to one side of the room and makes a pinhole in the window. At first light streams in through the pinhole and then upside down images appear on the opposite wall. They are images of people, the audience whose image is being projected live. This image turns into an earlier one of the audience arriving in the theatre and then into pedestrians on the street and then shots of streets teaming with people. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN puts on her glasses and the image turns the right way up. She begins to make the hole bigger. It’s revealed that she’s in a room within a room, a kind of giant camera obscura. She goes out the window towards the light and reappears amongst some of the projected images of pedestrians. We hear the sound of her voice, it should feel as if we are hearing her thoughts. VOICEOVER OF AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: It’s a familiar feeling, this one: being an observer of the human race. From here it seems that everything we do – our jobs, our relationships, our pleasures and our sufferings – are merely to stave off our alone-ness, to pass the time between before, now and then. I feel most alone amongst all this urgent evidence of living – driving and working and eating and talking and watching and sleeping and repeating, endlessly repeating. I’m comfortable in my own skin just not when it’s amidst all this other skin. In the video the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN stops still in the street, she is still for a long time as the people on the street speed up around her. The camera zooms into her face as she speaks, although the sound of her text need not necessarily synch with the words we hear. The effect of this out-of-synch, voiceover, should be of moving in closer to her real feelings. VOICEOVER OF AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Here, within the border of my skin I am safe from you in yours Each of us, alone, a single country, a territory of flesh, unassailed, landlocked. The camera zooms in on the still figure of the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN until the image itself seems to swim with all the moving atoms that form her image.

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NARRATOR: Of course, the key to landlocked is landing but every contact cracks you open. The breath of a memory, a space, a time and little fissures appear at your borders, which, once breached break apart and so you are birthed, feet first, in the world of spacetime where here and now are afloat. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN jumps back into the room. Video of TWO LITTLE GIRLS fills the space. Life As Light – Scene 1: The Counting or Colorful Memories MIRANDA (in silhouette until the very end) is live in Australia. She and the FEMALE VOICE have American accents. The FEMALE VOICE is unseen. The BLONDE WOMAN may have a wig that looks a bit like the TRAVELER. During her monologue MIRANDA gestures for the images on the screen to change. Numbers are heard spoken aloud. It sounds almost like the NUMBER VOICE is speaking in sentences. The NUMBER VOICE is Australian and may actually be more than one voice. The numbers are sections of the 39th Mersenne Prime Number. At about the last 10 digits, MIRANDA joins in the recitation. It holds meaning for her, she speaks as if she understands the language of the numbers. NUMBER VOICE: 757525738301925820025815102602705890157765074145 MIRANDA: I am looking for a pattern. Not only order within chaos but order within chaos that is recognizable to sentient beings not in my immediate vicinity. When I was very young, I thought all you needed to know was color. I wanted to become an astronomer. I was sure I would find other life forms in the stars. I felt sure that if I just kept looking, eventually a blue hominid would emerge from the ether at the outer curve of the known universe. Then I began to realize that the galaxies themselves were without language. Ancient gas formations are like trees in a Sequoia forest, full of life without consciousness. Then I discovered mathematics. At 16 I fell head first into fractal geometry. The perfect balance of the mathematical equation, the effect on the shapes and colors was devastating in its beauty. I saw the emergence of alien communication as an unimaginable fractal, the dialogue between numbers and gas resulting in a new way of reading the laws of the universe. Imagine the expression of PI without the help of a Greek alphabet? What color would it be? After years in my field, I know now it is not so dramatic. It comes down to patterns. Looking for a pattern, for

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the smallest trace of information to tip the scales from randomness toward meaning. It requires a steady and exacting analysis. This is my work. I enjoy this very much. I enjoy looking as closely, as thoroughly, as accurately as possible. But I don’t just look for patterns out there. I look for them close to home. Close to me. I count how many steps to the bus stop, how many trees on the street. I recognize codes in the colors of the houses on my block and the curtains in their windows. I have faith that it will all come together somehow. I compare the colors of the past with the lines of the present and the shapes of the future with the numbers of the past. This is how I find the meaning of my memories. Murkily beautiful orange and red colors swim by on the screen. Light seems to penetrate something membraneous. There is also a liquid quality to the image. The screen glows. MIRANDA: I remember listening to the radio while inside her, sound reaching in through the thick veil of her flesh. I remember an interview, not words, but two deep male voices, relaxed, assured of themselves, talking. I remember the news, voices modulated yet somehow filled with importance and urgency. I remember the vacuum cleaner. Terrifying. I remember just us, her outside, me inside, alone in a patch of sun in the morning. The sun reaches in to me just like the sound does, it brings color into my world, I am suspended in it, knowing only light, and warmth, and the space inside her. I can return to the memory any time I like, just like other memories, more mundane memories. The image shifts in color, becomes purple. MIRANDA: Other memories involve houses being painted, sweatshirts, grass, playgrounds, crayons, first crushes, high-school band, college parties, eyes, dogs, the scent of rain, m&m’s. I must note, however, that I cannot remember where I put my keys, to pick up mustard, what I meant to google, who I meant to email. The screen goes blank, then a projection of a simple wooden marionette moves around the space. MIRANDA: When I walk through the memory of the last time I ever saw her, its one-frame-at-a-time. She lifts her hand, waves. It is a film-book, fixed pictures that follow one another in an illusion of movement. A visual marionette. On “visual marionette” MIRANDA’S voice warps. Warping tones slowly fill the space. Hands or fingers manipulating the marionette are visible

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at the top of the frame. The action begins to speed up, faster, faster, and the image stretches horizontally and vertically, and then transforms to blurs of color reminiscent of the ‘womb color’, and then transforms to streaks of light. The ‘speed of light’ seems to warp MIRANDA’S silhouette. MIRANDA’S voice returns to normal on her next line. MIRANDA: She was a woman in a small town in the mid-west who smoked beautifully and dramatically. She loved and lived to smoke. I hated her smoking. The screen goes blank, the stage returns to normal. MIRANDA gestures and a sultry FEMALE VOICE breaks the silence. FEMALE VOICE: You hated me smoking but you smoke now. MIRANDA: You are such a narcissist. It’s not because of you. It’s in spite of you. (She gestures again) FEMALE VOICE: It’s the same thing. MIRANDA: The Universe is expanding everywhere: Our milky way is not the center of the expansion. The other galaxies recede from us as we drift away from them at the same rate. She recedes more and more from me every day. I worry about this and make great leaps of memory to cross the distance between us. I wonder if she ever worried that I would recede too far, that we might expand too much. On “expand too much”, MIRANDA’S voice begins to warp. The sounds and video of ‘light speed’ return and we shift. The Uncertainty Principle - SCENE 2: Time Projected text: “IF YOU ARE ACCOMPANIED BY EVEN ONE COMPANION YOU BELONG ONLY HALF TO YOURSELF” The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN and the footage of TWO LITTLE GIRLS returns beneath the line of projected text. Except for the line of text everything else remains unchanged from the end of Scene 1. The following two things happen simultaneously. 1. Nursery Rhyme (recording of TWO LITTLE GIRLS) GIRL 1: Star light, star bright GIRL 2: First star I see tonight

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GIRL 1: I wish I may, I wish I might GIRL 2: Have the wish I wish tonight. 2. Live text AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Ten years ago you had two years to live and today I can conjure up nothing for you except my own life trailing and your’s in the past blazing. The image and projected text dissolves (trails and blazes like a comet) and reforms as a webcast image of the AMERICAN WOMAN, who is sitting at a computer. An online chat is projected, each line is in a different colour to indicate the author. At first the text appears quickly, a word at a time, it indicates their relationship rather than what they would actually say to each other. The sound of TWO LITTLE GIRLS singing “Twinkle, twinkle little star” continues in the background: AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: You have your world, AMERICAN WOMAN: and I have mine. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: What we have together is a third thing, AMERICAN WOMAN: the thing that the two of us equal – Onstage the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN is sitting at a computer, we can hear the sound of her typing. The chat changes to present time with each line appearing as if being typed in the moment, quickly but a letter at a time, indicating they are ‘really’ chatting. AMERICAN WOMAN: you should be sleeping AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: can’t AMERICAN WOMAN: while one of us sleeps, the other looks after the world, remember? AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: I remember AMERICAN WOMAN: what’s up? The following two things happen simultaneously. The spoken text of the NARRATOR will need to be choreographed in response to the onscreen chat. 1. Onscreen chat AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: it’s eight years today since anna died AMERICAN WOMAN: your friend AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: death has made her the best of the “best friends”

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AMERICAN WOMAN: how so? AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: without the prangs of the day to day no slights no jibes no hurts recently no “recently” AMERICAN WOMAN: except today AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: when she returns, as if she’s never been away 2. Voice of NARRATOR NARRATOR: There is a story about a woman who used to be a girl and that girl had a best friend, a constant ally. With her best friend beside her she had everything she needed. The space between them was filled with a luminous ether which held up the stars. Together they stood on a platform of absolute rest, a constant place. The images cross fade as the following two things happen simultaneously: 1. The live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN speaks as projected images of her sitting appear on the screen behind her. There should be a similarity between the live and video images of her sitting. Onscreen there are many images of her sitting in the same place, but at different times of the day/year. The colours of the image blur so that it becomes an image of something else altogether, perhaps of another person entirely. The image comes back to one of her sitting. This time the same image is shown from many different angles at once. The effect should be of time passing and of her standing still, unmoved and unmovable. 2. LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Ten years ago you had two years to live and today I can conjure up nothing for you except my own life trailing and your’s in the past blazing. Of you I have fond memories And a shiver of your fear That brought you to this That brought you to nothing That brings you to me And me to today And eight years of such days

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Carrying you with fondness and with fear Carrying your fondnesses and your fears. The NARRATOR begins to speak as the live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN starts a movement sequence, a series of gestures that begin slowly and naturalistically. As the text progresses she gets faster and the series of movements become an abstracted version of the original sequence. NARRATOR: There is a Chinese story of time. In it time is a river. To a woman standing on its banks the future approaches her from behind and becomes the present only when it arrives alongside her. Before she can assimilate the present it is already past as it washes away to become history in front of her. So she faces her past by looking forward, while the present continuously blindsides her from an angle of vision that assures she will be unprepared.25 The NARRATOR’S story has infected the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN. She reassesses her earlier version of the effect of Anna’s death. LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Today I can conjure up something of you: the fluid weight of you the concrete of your loss the sip you took of freedom giddy with relief lying down with grief. For you sought both and you bring both to me now. The AMERICAN WOMAN and the following chat appear onscreen. AMERICAN WOMAN: r u still there? The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN types in response. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: I’ve been moving further from her but not getting further along.

25 Adapted from Shlain, 1991, pp.163-64.

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NARRATOR: That’s like the story of the Red Queen who says to Alice, “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”26 The following two things happen simultaneously. 1. The live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN stands in place as the image of GIRL 2 appears next to webcast image of AMERICAN WOMAN typing. The pre-recorded image of the webcast AMERICAN WOMAN and the objects around her speed up. The video appears on all surfaces surrounding the live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN. The video images become deformed. Shapes are flattened, perspective foreshortened. To the side objects appear thinner and taller, right angles are replaced by gentle curves, shadows disappear. Front and sides of objects can be seen simultaneously, there is height and depth, but not length. Objects behind become redder, in front bluer, to the side orange, yellow and green.27 This is what the world would look like if it was possible to view it at the speed of light. The video images reach the zenith of speed as the NARRATOR’S text finishes. 2. The NARRATOR speaks the following text while rotating the box that houses the live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN. NARRATOR: In Einstein’s story of time the past and the future get closer together the faster we travel. So the faster we travel the bigger the present gets. At the speed of light, the present incorporates all of the past and all of the future so that all time exists in one still moment of now.28 The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion.29 The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN appears in an image with GIRL 2 and the AMERICAN WOMAN: somehow they are all together. The light of the video is the only source. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN on stage is left outside of it, lit by it, but unable to attain what’s in it. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN sits back down to type and the projected online chat resumes. The AMERICAN WOMAN speaks her lines (although they still appear onscreen) and we hear her voice coming through the speakers from New York. As a result she becomes more present in the space and in the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN’S consciousness.

26 Carroll, 1872, p.30. 27 Shlain, 1991, pp.129-31. 28 Shlain, 1991, p.123. 29 Shlain, 1991, pp.131-32.

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AMERICAN WOMAN: are you still awake? AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: yes AMERICAN WOMAN: it must be getting late AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: what time is it where you are? AMERICAN WOMAN: 11:09am AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: yesterday. AMERICAN WOMAN: come for lunch today. Do the day over again. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: ok, I’ll be there in a bit. AMERICAN WOMAN: meet me at the coffee shop on 29th and Park. you know. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: i know. The projected text disappears. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: I am leaving Australia, it is Monday the 3rd at 7pm. I am here in New York, it is Monday the 3rd at 5.30pm. I arrived before I left. Two hours ago I had lunch at the corner of 29th and Park. In four years time she will be sad that I am leaving. She will ask me if I will cry at the airport. I will tell her she can and I will wait till I am on the plane. Both at once would just cancel each other out. It will be the best I can do. The live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN disappears in a blinding flash of light as the following handwritten text writes itself onto the screen. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN (written text only): when anna died my horizon vanished and so i entered a new country void of markers & timezones here, i walk into borderless territories where my past is my future and being blindsided by the present just cancels me out deflection it seems is the best I can do.

Life as Light – Scene 2: The Ancestry of Time or the Natural Flow of Place MIRANDA: 9. 5. 9 and 8 and 5 again. A pattern emerges and I think I have a grip on it, a story begins to form. But then one digit throws the

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whole thing off. Left without a theme, I fight the urge to make it up myself. I go back, read the sequence again, hoping this time the truth will emerge and maintain itself through to the end. And yet sometimes I’m caught off guard by the feeling that the beauty is in the lack of sequence. During the following monologue video of camels walking slowly, carrying packs, dissolves into slides of a pretty TRAVELER apparently taken in the 60s or 70s in various countries. MIRANDA: When I try to catch hold of her, “now” sometimes gets confused with “then”, or “later”. “Then” is far too simple. So is “there”. I can place her in Afghanistan, then effortlessly move her to India, or jump to Japan. All her paths are visible to me all at once. Kabul. Kyoto and Hong Kong and Nepal and Tibet. A stop in Calcutta. There was a conference in Tehran. And there were three months in Yucatan, Mexico. A study was being conducted. In Yucatan she slept in hamacas, cocoons of net that lightly mummified her, a protection against mosquitoes, and scorpions. No matter how fluid time becomes, I always end up back in Mexico, with the hamacas. Slides of the FATHER, as a young man, playing chess, dressed as a sailor, on a farm with a prize winning bull. MIRANDA: As a child, my father taught himself the habit of keeping a slight smile on his lips, a form of “putting his best face forward.” He now has a permanent smile that is initially peculiar, but finally reassuring. He is an optimist at heart. He has blue eyes that have been known to sparkle. MIRANDA: And as for her, she is my mother and this story is really her memory. Or her fantasy. Or her memory of her fantasy. Lights shift and we see in silhouette hamacas, a narrow Mexican hammock which has no wood frame, just folds of net, hanging like bananas or larvae, swinging infinitesimally. FEMALE VOICE: We slept in hamacas, to keep out the scorpions and spiders. I was gathering data, interviewing members of the Mayan Indian population in Ticul, Yucatan. I compiled statistics using a test of Affective Meaning. I was looking for a pattern of feeling, the feeling that words carry with them. I asked the Mayans to give a numeric rank for

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each word on three levels – how good is this word, how strong or weak, how active. The BLONDE WOMAN and GABRIEL are ‘born’ from 2 hamacas. She is seen putting on her wig and he putting on his mustache. Their costumes, are not detailed, rather they are items which iconically suggest who they are. BLONDE WOMAN: Viudo. Viuda. Espectro. Woman holds up cards that translate the words to English: “Widow”, “Widower”, “Spook.” GABRIEL: Nuevo, Cinco, Nuevo. Cards translate “9”, “5”, “9”. BLONDE WOMAN: Solitario. Farmacceutica. Cards: “Lonely”, “Pharmacist” GABRIEL: Ocho. Cinco. Cards translate “8”, “5” FEMALE VOICE: In the beginning I had extra time to explore Yucatan. The Mayan ruins were fascinating. I nearly fell into the well of Virgins. No great disaster, it probably would have spit me back out, anyway. The Mayans left no evidence of their civilization except their art. Inside the pyramids, sculptures of tigers and eagles and the Toltec god Choc-mool. A red jaguar throne with eyes of jade. 4000 years of enduring color, shapes and lines. But now, there wasn’t much good art in Yucatan. It was all tourist crap. I only found one true piece of folk art and it was ghastly. An inch long black beetle, with jewels glued to its back, one of which connected the beetle by a chain to a pin, so the living creature was worn as a brooch. I was hoping for a vase. A guy named Jesus, who organized the group for me and did some of the translating, called it a Makech. I couldn’t imagine bringing one of those home on the plane. A video of a Makech is briefly seen, followed by a slide of a group of Mexicans in a truck. Jesus picked them up, 20 boys and men, in a beat up blue dodge truck. They arrived looking like Elvis in 1955. Greased pompadours, white t-shirts and jeans and here it was 1968. Gabriel was dressed like the rest, same black hair and strong features. But much taller. Straight backed, with a proud bearing that showed in his handsome face. BLONDE WOMAN: Bueno. (Not translated, but FYI this means “Hello”)

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GABRIEL: Bueno. MIRANDA: Of course it’s his story too. Whoever he really was. GABRIEL: Speaks in Spanish, from now on the translation is projected. Ellos me escucharán. Hablo más tu idioma y tambien el idioma de los conquistadores. (The final sentence is spoken in English, with a confidence beyond his actual English-speaking ability.) All the conquerors. (TRANSLATION: They will listen to me. I speak their language, and also the language of the conquerors.) FEMALE VOICE: I expected the machismo, the little jokes, the nudges between them. They’d sit on the steps waiting to be called in, smoking, glancing back over their shoulders at me. Snickering. I overheard one of them say “Jean Harlow” and they all laughed. Jean Harlow! But the truth was, there weren’t many blondes in Yucatan. No art and no blondes. MIRANDA: The story goes something like this. They worked together over three months. He worked for her, he was her assistant. But his acuity with the statistics and his leadership of his own people attracted her, and her blonde hair and sharp wit attracted him. Mornings, over coffee boiled on an open fire in her kitchen, they exchanged glances, looks, smiles. She would glance down as the ants that lived in the fire pit traveled in circles around the coffee mugs. When she looked up he would be gazing at her, and knowing she had caught him, he’d wink. Absorbed in each other, they let the ants roam freely over their hands and wrists. They both knew the truth. FEMALE VOICE: We both knew what we both wanted. MIRANDA: That’s how the story goes. At least one version of it. MIRANDA calls her FATHER in America. At first just his voice can be heard in the theatre. Onscreen, a video of sparkling blue eyes. MIRANDA: Hi Daddy. FATHER: Oh, hi. I managed to stay awake but I’m pretty groggy. MIRANDA: Is your webcam on? FATHER: I had some trouble with that URL but I’m online now.

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MIRANDA: Ok, let’s see him up here, yep, that’s my dad. A video image of a man appears on a secondary screen. From now on he or his apartment is visible. Sometimes he shows objects from his travels around the world, sometimes he focuses on a U.S. newspaper or other location defining object. He might survey slowly minutia of his house, pens next to a crossword puzzle, the leaves of a house plant, etc. FATHER: Hi MIRANDA: How are you? FATHER: Fine. MIRANDA: How’s the U.S? FATHER: It’s fine, depending on your point of view. MIRANDA: So Father, tell me again about the project you were doing in Mexico. FATHER: (Something about statistical research of words, who paid for it, the university’s interest in it, academic language, blah blah blah…final cue for MIRANDA is “measuring”) MIRANDA: And what population were you studying in Mexico? FATHER: We were in the Yucatan, which is Mayan. MIRANDA: And can you give me an example? FATHER: Of what kind of things we did? (MIRANDA nods. He gives a few examples…final cue for MIRANDA is “countries”.) MIRANDA: So did you find any patterns? FATHER: He talks some more…final cue for MIRANDA is “weak”. MIRANDA: Tell me the part about the CIA spy. FATHER: (So and so was probably a CIA spy. They were spying because blah blah blah…final cue ‘We’ll leave it at that.)

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A video again of a marionette. As it begins to warp into light speed, we shift. The Uncertainty Principle - SCENE 3: Light Live and onscreen the space is filled with random images of light, e.g., the tip of a cigarette in the dark, the warm light of a window in a house viewed from outside, blood running through bodies, the glow of a pumping heart, lit liquid in a glass that is being drunk from, the white pages of an open book illuminating the face of the reader, the light from the footage of the TWO LITTLE GIRLS making frangipani necklaces, a patch of morning sun, a triangle of light left on the floor by an open door. Onscreen these images of light recede until they each become a star. The entire space is engulfed by stars in the night sky. The following line of text appears amongst the stars. Projected text: “…AND IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE COMPANION YOU WILL FALL MORE DEEPLY INTO THE SAME PLIGHT…” The live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN can be seen sitting in profile, her face framed by a tiny airplane window is turned towards the audience. The sound from the opening scene returns, it could be the sea, wind or the sound of a jet passing overhead. It is as if she is the only person on earth. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: I am leaving New York. The night is a black sea beneath me. I am flying over little countries of orange light. At the edges where the lights are sparse the faint coral of lost countries glows beneath them. In between these orange countries the sea of night becomes an indistinguishable blackness, the interruption of light, an absence of anything at all, until its very blackness becomes something - another country. The orange country gets closer and closer. I can make out each and every individual light. The wing’s silhouette is a border of another kind, a cardboard cut-out outline, a border of another kind, a country laid atop another which is laid atop another and another. Touchdown. All the countries are lost from view, constantly lost and something in me cracks open. The NARRATOR comes into view perched just outside the ‘airplane’. The following text is slightly overlapped. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: This inexplicable loss NARRATOR: At the speed of light

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AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: A loss without order NARRATOR: At the speed of light it is too late to think of now; the moment is already past. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Without dimension or time NARRATOR: At the speed of light it is impossible to sneak up on the present, because it is still the future. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: A thing lacking all known qualities NARRATOR: At the speed of light the present oozes over our ordinary temporal boundaries spilling into the past and the future.30 AUSTRALIAN WOMAN & NARRATOR: (Simultaneously) Which means the impossible isn’t. The image of the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN through the airplane window transforms into her sitting at her computer and the online chat resumes. The following text is both typed and spoken. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: home again I have two lives one there one here and this space in-between, this elsewhere, is a third thing, the one true constant, constantly lost waiting to be found again. The webcast AMERICAN WOMAN appears, she looks directly down the camera for the first time. We see her mouth move but the text she says comes from the NARRATOR. The stars come out as she speaks, partially covering the AMERICAN WOMAN. NARRATOR: Every star has a story. The light from a star that is one million light-years away needs one million years to cross space before it can arrive here on earth. During this time the star itself may have ceased to exist, an event that happened elsewhere, in-between then and now, there and here. But what is lost is never fully lost when a million years after it ceased to exist the star’s light falls upon your eyes.31

30 Adapted from Shlain, 1991, p.188. 31 Adapted from Shlain, 1991, p.256.

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The live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN begins counting the stars. Clouds appear in the projected night sky. An image of the moon peering out of the clouds appears. On another part of the screen the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN is projected. Perhaps she is pictured in the AMERICAN WOMAN’S space. Throughout the following text the moon gradually goes behind the clouds. LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: The moon is tearing herself a hole in the sky, lighting up the clouds so that they are mountains in the air. VIDEO AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: She thinks she needs nothing and no one. LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: I’m tearing myself a hole – or is it a mountain? VIDEO AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: she thinks. Then catching herself in the thought she thinks she thinks. LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: “I’m going through a particularly self-sufficient period at the moment,” VIDEO AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: She waxes, or is she waning? LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: “I’m going through a particularly self-sufficient period at the moment,” VIDEO AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: she weaves and tears herself another hole. The moon (which has disappeared behind the clouds) moves out again. LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Or is it that the sky releases her? VIDEO AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: “I’m going through a particularly self-sufficient period at the moment” LIVE AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: she scoffs, knowing she will always need the sky. The clouds cover the moon again. The AMERICAN WOMAN is visible again, she types and speaks.

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AMERICAN WOMAN: When it’s dark there, the light is here. I’m saving up daylight for you. You sleep and I’ll take care of the world now. The AMERICAN WOMAN disappears from the screen. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN opens a book, her face is reflected by its open pages. She half whispers, half mouths with the NARRATOR. NARRATOR: In Buddhism there is a story of light. When you look into a pool of water, if the water is still, you can see the moon reflected. If the water is agitated, the moon is fragmented and scattered. It is harder to see the true moon. Our minds are like that. When my mind is agitated, I cannot see the true world. It is only when the wind quiets and the pool becomes still that it is possible to discern what lies beneath the surface.32 The live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN is revealed, bathed in a pool of glorious light, she dips her toe into the ‘water’ which twinkles “like the facets of a diamond twinkling at slightly different instants”. The present is not universal and simultaneous, it is made up of “multiple different instants.”33 When she notices she begins to count the lights on her skin and in the air around her, not in sequential order but reminiscent of MIRANDA’S recitation of the 39th Mersenne Prime Number. Life As Light – Scene 3: The Illumination of Illusion MIRANDA: They say at the speed of light all moments in time become visible at once from all possible angles. To achieve the truth of this memory I must achieve the speed of light. I must look not only at her story but also between hers and hers-that-is-mine and his-that-is-hers and his-that-I-just-made-up. The question is, if you travel at the speed of light and all possible moments are visible from all possible angles, can you still tell the difference between them? I hope to find a pattern… Darkness. And then the FEMALE VOICE, this time accompanied by the HARLOW VIDEO, a piece of black and white video of the BLONDE WOMAN dressed like Jean Harlow in a white satin dress, so blonde her hair is white in the black and white rendering of her image and her lips are black and she is smoking, maybe through a cigarette holder. Her lips are not in synch with the words we hear from the FEMALE VOICE.

32Adapted from Shlain, 1991, p.192 and Muth, 2005, n.p. 33 Shlain, 1991, p.135.

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FEMALE VOICE: And when we started the work, he proved he was clever. The Mayans, my subjects, hired for a few pesos a day, they looked up to him. He thrilled at the role of administrator. Before I hired him he was a shoemaker. Now, he was in charge. He smoked expensive cigarettes, while I myself smoked the cheap Mexican brand. His pride was contagious. And attractive. FEMALE VOICE: I know what I felt. What I felt coming from him. It was so subtle, almost imperceptible; he moved his hand, a little twitching near the edge of his lips. FEMALE VOICE: He had that way of listening. And staring. So you knew. He was focused. On you. The HARLOW VIDEO flickers and disappears. MIRANDA: I heard the story so many times before I understood. Only with all points in time visible do I get it. With the addition of my own memory. The last time I saw her she waved goodbye. She smiled, knowing she was imprinting a last impression, not of smoke but of love. But the smoke remains. It never clears. I add up all the moments and then it makes sense. The story begins to make sense. A pattern emerges. Mexico. Research. FEMALE VOICE: The project. I can name it now. Project Despair. MIRANDA: Desperately researched, patterns emerge and the results settled around her in a cloud of smoke. FEMALE VOICE: I needed a new project. He wanted me. I could see myself in his eyes. I was losing a grip on myself. I needed the observer, to make notes, to make assumptions. To cause changes. MIRANDA: She could not trust her own data. It seemed that space itself had rebelled, she was not sure if he was in her world or she in his. MIRANDA lights a lamp. She steps down from her place, entering playing space, but her face is still in shadow. All other lights go out and she walks slowly around GABRIEL and the BLONDE WOMAN, lighting them with the lamp. Their shadows grow and shrink, and move around the space, along the walls, onto the ceiling, onto the floor. MIRANDA steps away from them. Mariachi music plays. They dance woodenly.

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MIRANDA: She desired him. On her last night in Ticul they threw a party for her. She was drunk. He walked her home. She offered herself to him, and he refused. Light change. GABRIEL breaks away from the Woman. He’s in a spotlight. He speaks in English, above his actual English-speaking ability. It is as if we are listening to his real thoughts. GABRIEL: When I first met her, I wasn’t impressed. These anthropologists, they come and go too. Who says there won’t be another blonde, here to look at the Indians. But I realized she was watching me, and before long I could see myself through her eyes. I wasn’t just another Mayan to her, another shoemaker. I was on the other side of the experiment this time. We found the pattern together. The data emerged, and it was she and I who wrote the story of it. Statistically, the Mayans rank scientist well above shoemaker and pharmacist, but beneath friend or lover. And somehow, with her, I was living all those things at once. FEMALE VOICE: I know what I felt. What I felt coming from him. It was real. The problem was, I’d gotten involved. I set out to observe patterns, to determine recognizable traits of linguistic passivity in groups of indigenous Mexicans. But I got too close. I made him my assistant. I bought him expensive cigarettes. I drank coffee with him in the mornings before the others arrived. I got involved and my subject was…adversely…affected. MIRANDA: That’s the story. That’s what she wrote. I can read it any time. At any point I can intersect with the story and it stays there, typed, yellowing pages, words of hers that I keep along with a few mementos, from her travels. The spotlight goes out. MIRANDA holds up her lamp. By moving her hand close to the lamp, her hand appears enormous. She picks up GABRIEL’S silhouette and makes him move like a puppet. She makes him address her. Again he speaks in English, above his actual English-speaking ability. GABRIEL: If you want to get to light speed you need a running start. That takes space. Get far enough away. Lights change. MIRANDA runs back to her place in front of the screen. MIRANDA: So I came to Australia.

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A few moments of lights streaking along at light speed. There’s a shift. The Uncertainty Principle - SCENE 4: Complementarity Projected text: “IF YOU ARE ALONE YOU BELONG ENTIRELY TO YOURSELF…IF YOU ARE ACCOMPANIED BY EVEN ONE COMPANION YOU BELONG ONLY HALF TO YOURSELF…AND IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE COMPANION YOU WILL FALL MORE DEEPLY INTO THE SAME PLIGHT” (Leonardo da Vinci) The projected text disappears. When the live AUSTRALIAN WOMAN begins to speak it is with the voice of the AMERICAN WOMAN, at some point their voices meld until only the voice of the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN can be heard. AMERICAN/AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Gathering pieces of light. Counting the stars till daylight comes. Daylight saving: A patch of morning sun; A triangle of light left on the floor by the open door; A memory of a day at the beach (the day I first read Jane Eyre welding forever the frosted light of Thornfield and the dazzling light of Coolangatta). All the light you’ve saved for me From all the days we do not spend together Every patch Crack And sliver Of light. In this light, this gathered light, I watch us all driving and working and eating and talking and watching and sleeping and repeating, endlessly repeating and yet we are all elsewhere too, covered in darkness watching ourselves in the light, driving, working, eating, talking, watching, sleeping….my alone-ness and I. The AMERICAN WOMAN appears onscreen. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN speaks and the typing appears. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: you should be sleeping AMERICAN WOMAN: can’t AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: while one of us sleeps, the other one looks after the world, remember? AMERICAN WOMAN: i remember

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AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: what’s up? AMERICAN WOMAN: it’s been 12 years since my mother died and today I can conjure up nothing for her, but i remember listening to the radio while inside her and feeling the sun reaching in. she recedes more and more from me everyday. The AUSTRALIAN WOMAN types what the NARRATOR says. NARRATOR: Remember what you told me about light? At the quantum level, where everything is infinitesimal light has a whole other story. Here light is both a wave and a particle. It is not either a wave or either a particle, but it is both a wave and a particle, one without the other is inadequate.34 You and she are never separate. AMERICAN WOMAN: what time is it where you are? AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: around 9 AMERICAN WOMAN: tomorrow AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: come for dinner. AMERICAN WOMAN: ok, I’ll be there in a bit. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: meet me at the top of the arcade in adelaide st. you know. AMERICAN WOMAN: i know. goodnight. NARRATOR/AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: goodnight. sleep well. The AMERICAN WOMAN disappears. All the preceding images rain down around the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN. As they fall a number is recited, until the sounds of many voices can be heard. She takes off her glasses and these images and all the letters that make up the projected text turn upside down and rain in every direction around her. As they fall they transform into stars projected onto the ground. During the following text a path appears amongst the stars, it leads the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN to the NARRATOR sitting in her hamaca. They greet one another and swap places. NARRATOR: Once upon a time you will meet an old woman who has crossed over from one path, the path of making family, and set off on another, a solo path. Here on this path, she travels without a time and space because all times and spaces are present and everyone she’s ever known and all the times she’s ever had with them are here. Here your best friend Anna who died many years ago is making frangipani necklaces with Miranda, the American woman you met along the way.

34 Adapted from Shlain, 1991, pp.22-23.

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All your friends scattered around the world, live here all together. Every idea discussed, every story told, every country visited has its place. Einstein and the Red Queen are sharing a gondola in Venice, Alice and Jane Eyre are standing at the edge of the well of Virgins, Jean Harlow is lying low on Coolangatta beach. And the future’s there calling you with as much form and substance as the past that’s holding you. It’s available to you at any time this path but getting there the first time could take your whole life. The NARRATOR tucks the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN into a hamaca. NARRATOR: You dream while I take care of the world. The projected text returns: “IF YOU ARE ALONE YOU BELONG ENTIRELY TO YOURSELF…IF YOU ARE ACCOMPANIED BY EVEN ONE COMPANION YOU BELONG ONLY HALF TO YOURSELF…AND IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE COMPANION YOU WILL FALL MORE DEEPLY INTO THE SAME PLIGHT” (Leonardo da Vinci) The NARRATOR reaches up towards the text, covers the ‘P’ in ‘PLIGHT’ and the word ‘LIGHT’ appears as all the other words melt away. She appears to pluck the word from the screen and carry light in her hand. The opening sound returns as the NARRATOR moves down the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN’S path and stands absolutely still with her hand bathed in light. NARRATOR: I am a small woman who lives ‘alone’ in a big country. I am happy to be alone. With my alone-ness beside me I have everyone I need. With me watching her and she watching me, together we are what the other will be, the thing the two of us equal.

Life as Light – Scene 4: My Complements to the Truth The video marionette moves about the space and then the hands are seen releasing the strings. The marionette crumples to the floor and fades away. MIRANDA: But see, it really is just that. A story. Because she didn’t even conduct the research. That was my father’s job. She was his wife and she came along for the ride. What she did was…

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FEMALE VOICE: Shop for folk art. Bring him lunch. Watch the scorpions sleep in the corner in the heat of the afternoon. You’d have done it yourself. I know you. You’d have tried to breath life into it. You’d have found alien artefacts on the steps of The Well of Virgins. Discovered Mayan numerology that rivalled the Kabalah. Even if no one else saw it, you’d have found your own patterns to cling to. MIRANDA: She wrote the story much later, on a typewriter at the kitchen table, fuelled by coffee and cigarettes and the need to escape from her life as a stay-at-home mom. My mom. FEMALE VOICE: Writers write what they know. I never claimed to look like Jean Harlow. It was the little Mexican kids who said that. MIRANDA: You told me it was really a kid on a train in Calcutta. FEMALE VOICE: But the feeling was the same! The blonde outsider. I drank coffee with Mayans. I read your father’s anthropological journals. I observed. I wrote it down. I remember. I wrote with words, not numbers. The truth lies outside the story on the page. The pattern is erratic and cannot be empirically proven. But the truth is still there. MIRANDA: 9258200258151. The truth lies between the numbers. Ok, I agree with you. Because of the Makech. Because of the Makech, the story is both real and not real. Because of the Makech the truth lies between what’s real and what’s not real. MIRANDA: Daddy, you still there? FATHER: Yep. Getting tired though. MIRANDA: Ok, I’m almost done. Can you please tell us about the Makech? FATHER: Yucatan is full of bugs, grasshoppers, scorpions, beetles. They are part of the Mayan peoples lives. A beetle, with jewels glued to its back and a chain attached to the jewels is known as a Makech. It is worn as jewellery but fed and cared for as a pet and lives for many years. The Mayans give these bugs as a gift to people who are important to them. MIRANDA: And you gave her one, didn’t you?

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FATHER: Yes, I did. MIRANDA: I remember her telling me you did. She told me how she took the Makech my father gave her on the plane, how it lived for several years in the States, reminding her of the hamacas and the kitchen fires and the Mayans and the numbers and the words and the scorpions. And Gabriel. Who ever he was. If he even existed. FEMALE VOICE: (The HARLOW video returns). I came back to the U.S. and the Makech did not die. I had a baby and the Makech was still with me. I typed for days at the kitchen table, my cigarette forgotten in the ashtray. It was a reverie. Mexico came rushing back to me. You slept at my feet and the Makech crawled in circles on the tablecloth. I prayed to my small friend on the table to breathe life into the story. I asked the Makech for a leading man, an exotic one with dark hair and a proud bearing that showed on his handsome face. Your father got so tan in Mexico. He had that black hair – you’d have taken him for a Mayan on first glance. MIRANDA: The Makech is real and it’s in the story too. The story goes something like this: Lights up on GABRIEL and the BLONDE WOMAN, dancing to the mariachi music, laughing, enjoying themselves. The actors use a presentational style, the ‘chemisty’ between them is more signified than lived, but not satirical. BLONDE WOMAN: (Voiced by the FEMALE VOICE) And you promise to drive me to the airport tomorrow. GABRIEL: (In Spanish, with translation projected) Yo no confiaria nadie harcelo más. (TRANSLATION: I would not trust anyone else to do it.) They walk a little, then stop as if in front of a door. Gabriel hangs back. BLONDE WOMAN: Haven’t I conquered you yet? How about coming in for a little while? For a drink? GABRIEL: (His English here is hesitant and heavily accented. This is how she hears him.) No thank you, Miss. Harlow.

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Gabriel hurries away. The BLONDE WOMAN covers her face with her hands. She goes to her hamaca and sits on it like a swing. Spiders and scorpions are projected on the screen, superimposed over the HARLOW VIDEO, so it appears that the creatures crawl all over her. Inky black fills the screen and the image disappears. Lights like a sunrise on the horizon fill the stage. GABRIEL enters with a suitcase, hands it to the BLONDE WOMAN. GABRIEL: (In Spanish, with translation projected) Gracias para darme esta oportunidad (TRANSLATION: I must thank you for giving me this opportunity.) BLONDE WOMAN: It was nothing. I needed you. GABRIEL: Si vengo a los estados, you le visitaré? (TRANSLATION: If I come to the States, shall I visit you?) BLONDE WOMAN: Sure. She turns as if to board a plane. GABRIEL: (His English here and below is hesitant and heavily accented. This is how she hears him) Wait. He hands her a box. As she looks at it the video of the Makech fills the screen. GABRIEL: (Holding up the box, which is a tiny birdcage. Light pours through it.) Here is where he sleeps. He eats the block of wood in the center. It will last his whole life. He will stay with you a long time. And so will I. He hands the box back to her and they embrace. He clutches her hair, then her back, then her waist and then lets her go. She takes the suitcase and backs away, the tiny birdcage resting in her palm. Spotlight on GABRIEL. He speaks in English, to the audience, with a confidence beyond his actual English-speaking ability. He is direct and clear in his thoughts and intentions. He says the last line “That I was sure of” in both Spanish and English.

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GABRIEL: She was the wife of one of the researchers. Her husband told the other anthropologists he was impressed with the work I did for him. They offered me a job on a University project in New York. To thank him, I helped him find a gift for his wife. I suggested the Makech, a symbol of my people. It was also a way to thank her myself. I don’t know if he gave it to her or not. I don’t know how long it lived. But I knew she would like it. That I was sure of. GABRIEL disappears. Lights up on Miranda. Miranda types an email visible onscreen: “Dear Father. Thank you for taking my mother with you to Mexico, giving her the source for her beautiful story “The Makech”. Thank you for giving her the Makech because when she told me about it when I was a little girl, I knew it was important to her and she trusted me with the story, which was her story and also your story. And I, too, am both her story and your story. So thank you.” Miranda now steps out of the silhouette. We see her, an ordinary woman. The NUMBER VOICE speaks in sentences of numbers and she joins in at times. Numbers are projected all over the space. NUMBER VOICE: 615956528427179011881855200302787663574142444819315465 Then the Numbers fade away and the red/orange images from the beginning appear on the screen. MIRANDA: I remember being inside her. I remember her hands, red and cracked from doing dishes. I remember Nivea hand cream, great quantities of it. FATHER: (Sound only) Oh, I remember the Nivea. She’d finish one blue tub after another. I’d wash the tub and save quarters in it. I must have had ten or twelve of them, lined up on the counter, full of quarters for laundry. The red/orange images blur into streaks of light. MIRANDA: In Australia my head points down. Drains drain the wrong way. I wait for the bus on the wrong side of the street almost every other day. I get holidays off for battles fought years ago in Turkey and tomato sauce is really ketchup. “I’ll shout for it” means “I’ll get this round” and people go on “smoko” even when they don’t smoke. These are the things that tell me where I am, that confirm my memory of the journey here,

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because there are days I can’t believe I can’t just walk over to my father’s place for a cup of coffee. I cannot conceive of the space between here and there. I don’t think America really exists at all. Or Brisbane either. I must be living at light speed, one point in space is not favored over another, I’m here and then I’m there and then here again. Where was I? FEMALE VOICE: That’s what I was after, to live at light speed. Same as you. FEMALE VOICE: Or was it to live as light? I can’t remember. Sound of a film running through a projector. We see the HARLOW video, as usual, smoking, looking glamorous and sad. She seems to be made of light. The darkness of the image grows fainter, and the light grows brighter, until it is just a projection of white light. Footage of the FATHER returns. FATHER: Remembering being inside her though, I’m not so sure about that. You do have her imagination. The FATHER passes an object from America to Australia through the webcam. It is the tiny cage that houses the Makech. MIRANDA: Motion is closely connected to time. Absolute time does not exist. If she stays still and I go to the grocery store, or to Australia, or to the moon and back, I will have aged less than her. She no longer moves. The photos are still, a point of rest, in time. Somehow I kept moving, while she stayed still. Is that how I got to be so much older than her? The slides of the TRAVELER from earlier cycle across the screen. MIRANDA watches them. MIRANDA: I didn’t go to Nepal, or India or Japan or Mexico. I came to Australia, where they speak English and although they drive on the other side they are trying to reconcile the racism of a colonial past just like us and they have just as many strip malls. I am not her, choosing risk over boredom, I have my own agenda, my work, numbers, meaning. But it doesn’t matter. In Australia I know my memories, my stories, are infinitesimally small. At the subatomic level individual particles have the very unsettling property of being able to travel two paths, in short be in two places, while remaining the same, intact, individual, singular object.

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So you see, no matter where I go, I am her, and no matter what time it is, the memories play themselves over and over, and I get born again. The medley of Australian voices recites the numbers again, MIRANDA joins in at times. NUMBER VOICE: 757525738301925820025815102602705890157765074145 As the voice trails off, the red and gold colors swim on the screen as MIRANDA speaks. MIRANDA: I don’t know time inside her. Only orange and red and light And her. I hear the vacuum cleaner and the radio sing to one another And then a new voice, an odour, the song of a smell Is it rose, jasmine, lavender? Too soon to tell. And a prememory emerges Plays across my foetal eyes like a film A white veranda and the sweetest kiss of a breeze. From deep inside her I think I can’t wait to bring her to Australia We will sit together, on the veranda, hand in hand. And years and years later we will remember the smell of frangipani. The NARRATOR guides MIRANDA to the hamaca where the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN has been sleeping. MIRANDA and the AUSTRALIAN WOMAN sit together, as the hamaca slightly swings.

The End.

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Appendix Four:

Photographs from The Physics Project (Magdalena and Loft versions)

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The Physics Project (work-in-progress, Magdalena version) Performer: Stace Callaghan as Anna 2

Photo: Suzon Fuks

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The Physics Project (work-in-progress, Magdalena version) Performers (R to L): Dan Hope as Jack; Erin O’Leary as Grace

Photo: Suzon Fuks

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The Physics Project (work-in-progress, Magdalena version) Performers (R to L): Dan Hope as Jack; Erin O’Leary as Grace

Photo: Suzon Fuks

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The Physics Project (Loft version) Performer: Erica Field as Australian Woman

Photo: Marina Wedge

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The Physics Project (Loft version) Performer: Hanna Wood as Miranda

Photo: Marina Wedge

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The Physics Project (Loft version) Performers (R to L): Margi Brown Ash as Narrator; Erica Field as Australian

Woman; Amantha May as American Woman (webcast) Photo: Marina Wedge

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The Physics Project (Loft version) Performers (R to L): Errin Rodger as Gabriel; Emily Thomas as Blonde Woman

Photo: Marina Wedge

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The Physics Project (Loft version) Performer: Margi Brown Ash (Narrator)

Photo: Marina Wedge

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Appendix Five:

The Physics Project DVD (Loft version)

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Appendix Six:

Reviews The Physics Project

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Feature: The Women's Pages

To drive the work, compel the listening

Mary Ann Hunter

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New media consolations

Stephen Carleton at The Physics Project

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Reference List

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Armstrong, G. 1997. Theatre as a Complex Adaptive System. New Theatre Quarterly, XIII (51): 277-88.

Aronowitz, S. 1996. Technoscience and Cyberculture. New York: Routledge.

Aronowitz, S. 1997. Alan Sokal's "Transgression". Dissent, 44(1): 107-10.

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