Unknowable Certainty: lullaby to put myself to rest by Cyan D'Anjou, Luisa do Amaral, Sunghoon Song
Presented by : Cyan D'Anjou, Luisa do Amaral, Sunghoon Song
In the face of an inevitable End 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. Despite knowing our database comes short of reality, why, nonetheless, do we aim to quantify our lived experiences?
Unknowable Certainty is a collaborative project between artists Cyan D’Anjou, Sunghoon Song, and computational social scientist Luisa do Amaral. Their interdisciplinary approaches, characterized by the deliberate convergence and divergence of inquiries, culminate in the physical representation of a shared reflective process–a candid exposition of self-analysis. In hopes to allow the cycle to rest, they approach work from an existentialist perspective, aiming to invite compassion for sentiment and the experience of being to exist validly, free of explanation.
In his discussion of subversions of rationality, Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster describes the moral and intellectual fallacies that humans are guilty of, when dealing with mental or social states that are “by-products of actions undertaken for other ends” (Elster, 1983). These are states that cannot be brought about intentionally, nor can they be “explained away” easily by connecting the outcomes to specific actions.
To tell the story of failing to capture the full depth of lived emotions within societally valued computational frameworks of rationality, Unknowable Certainty is an audiovisual performance showing the experience of being caught in the past–searching for a numerical value that might explain the moments leading up to a present confrontation with the “end”–as if to balance a scale. Told through the story of a person aging and reflecting on her past, the work portrays the hope that finding this variable might prove that human experiences have a logical explanation, and is thus the future becomes solvable and less uncertain.
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, 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 a endless search for an unknowable variable in the equation for certainty.
The conceptual exploration behind Unknowable Certainty ignited out of the artists’ mutual experience of desiring to elude the inherently human feeling of loss by seeking understanding through rationalization and finding explanations unreachable to the human eye through analysis. The team bonded over shared experiences of feeling caught in a cycle of going back and forth through analyses of past moments, exchanges, and memories, wishing there were a computational resolution or equation to solve for emotion. They combine their multidisciplinary backgrounds and dispositions to craft frameworks that would allow them to reinterpret these situations.
Addressed in a distinctive formats immersive visual performance format, the performance and film probe different theories of how the human mind processes and interprets life experiences, from philosophical, sociological, psychological and cognitive perspectives to imagine a scenario in which the past can be plotted as points in a graph. If we were able to, what would we gain in ability to process uncertainty? What would we lose? In order to invite (or rather entice audiences to consider) compassion for human affect to coexist with out technological pursuits, the performance of Unknowable Certainty depicts two performers representing mind (data processing, past, logic) and body (present, phenomenology, affect) who initially act separately eventually coming together to feel grounded in the current moment amongst the audience. To the extent that this study investigates the obsessive search for meaning or purpose in uncertain times, it starts from ourselves and our shared humanity.
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, subjective, rendering this graph essentially unusable to logical standards. Yet, in the performance and exhibition settings, placed in a space that allows diverse forms of expression–sound, movement, film–to coexist, this dysfunctional graphs still communicates it’s message and intention clearly to it’s feeling human audience. The combined elements of a visual film, live choreography, lullaby, sound design, and the durational depiction of a graphical analysis converge to illustrate the process of breaking from reliving in cycles of past and extend an invitation for sentiment existing beyond understanding.