Unknowable Certainty
Immersive performance, 2-channel film projection(14:40). Jan 2024 

by Cyan D’Anjou, Luisa do Amaral, and Sunghoon Song

 

 

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*The video shows excerpts of the full performance.


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In the face of a definite ending emerges an uncompromising realization: the expansion and weight of the past as the future narrows to an unknowable but certain finite point. To extend time, a cycle of reaching into a database of recollection hopes to yield validation for the cumulative result–the emotional landscape of now. To tell the story of failing to capture the full depth of lived experiences within societally valued frameworks of rationality, Unknowable Certainty is an immersive performance embodying the narrative of ageing–as a metaphorical confrontation of a definite ending.

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In a sociological sense, Unknowable Certainty was born from theories that explained social action through the lens of mathematical transaction, but in trying to map human experiences through the language of computation we come short of accounting for the complexity of social reality. In every mathematical model, there exists a built-in margin for error that accounts for the omitted, sentimental, factors that go unobserved. Factors that would invalidate our results. And thus, without an answer, we are caught in an endless search for an unknowable variable in the equation for certainty.

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Unknowable Certainty shows the experience be caught in a search for an unidentifiable variable that might help quantify the cumulative experiences leading up to the present–as if to balance a scale. It portrays the fallacy in the hope that finding this variable would prove that the gravity of feeling has a logical explanation and is thus perfectly solvable. The combined elements of a visual film, live choreography, and the durational depiction of a graphical analysis converge to illustrate the process of breaking from reliving in cycles of the past and extend an invitation for sentiment existing beyond understanding.
 

The main visual elements of Unknowable Certainty, the graphs projected onto the floor, are referenced from early explorations looking for computational representations of the human mind and its perceived rationality. But the independent, dependent variables and the points plotted on them are intentionally emotional, and subjective, rendering this graph essentially unusable to logical standards. Yet, in the performance setting, placed in a space that allows diverse forms of expression to coexist, these dysfunctional graphs still communicate it’s message and intention clearly to it’s feeling human audience.

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Unknowable Certainty is a collaborative piece that was created together with Luisa do Amaral (sociologist) and Sunghoon Song (film artist) and was supported by Ars Electronica and the IT: U (Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria). It is presented both at the IT: U campus in the depicted installation format and in the final immersive performance version at the Ars Electronica Deep Space 8k venue.


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