the unpredictable interstices of process

This performance took part as part of the exhibition 'The Allegory of the Cave' at the Art Container in Tallinn Estonia in August 2010. It was conceptualised by Linda Persson and actualised with Estonian dancer Laura Kvelstein and philosopher Liam Sprod. The focus of the performance was the relations between sound, movement and light within space in its different lived, scientific/mathematical and phenomenological determinations, conceptualisations and presentations. It combined the movements of the dancer within the artificial mathematical structure of a gird with the disharmonious sound generated by rubbing the surface of a balloon contrasted with the perfect sound of a treated piano and accompanied by the computerised reading of quotes from a book on the new field of asteroseismology (Kurtz D. W. et al., Asteroseismology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2007)). This field aims to discover the composition of stellar objects by listening to the frequencies and harmonies generated by them. This idea of the “harmony of the spheres” dates back to the time of Pythagoras (whose strict and specific mathematical metaphysics was an influence on Plato and his affirmation of the realm of forms and the allegory of the cave) However, the harmony of the spheres is itself merely an allegorical shadowplay as the actual sound generated by the stars cannot be heard across the vacuum of space, only mathematically determined retrospectively from the flickering of the light as it reaches Earth. Nor is this sound as harmonious as those generated in the overtunes of a piano string, it has more in common with the discord playing across the stretched and stressed surface of a balloon. Likewise, it is through movement in space which the world is determined and encountered, never as a direct mathematical equation, scientific calculation or pure form/alism. Just as the dancer disrupts the grid she moves through creating the performance and event, the lived life of the phenomenological subject object distinction creates the world and its own knowledge together. (text Liam Sprod)