Unknowable Certainty

About the work

Unknowable Certainty explores ageing as a confrontation with an ending that is certain even as its timing remains unknown. As the future narrows, the weight of remembered experience grows. The performance follows an attempt to account for that accumulated past, asking whether a feeling can be justified by identifying and measuring the experiences that produced it.

Film, live choreography and projected graphs bring this desire for explanation into a shared space. The graphs borrow the language of computational models, but their variables are emotional and subjective. They communicate an experience while resisting the logical standards that would make them useful as measurements. The work questions what falls outside frameworks that treat human experience as a set of rational transactions. As the search for an explanation reaches its limits, the work opens a space for feeling to exist without having to be proved or fully understood.

Two large projections extend across a wall and the floor, while performers move within and between the images. Recorded scenes, live bodies and spatial sound occupy different planes. Attention moves between them, making the encounter with a film inseparable from the space and bodies around it. Within Song’s continuing practice, this is an early exploration of moving image as a spatial experience, informing the later investigation of spatial montage and embodied perception in Willow.