I’m glad someone else was terrified by this performance. I talked to some of my friends who also saw superposition and a lot of us experienced a very physical and visceral reaction (i.e. sweating, heavy breathing). I think what terrified me the most was the apparent chaos of the performance. At times it felt like everything was falling apart and I honestly felt like I was witnessing the end of the universe. I agree with your belief that this is the intention of art: to push boundaries and help us to see the world in a different way. Superposition definitely accomplished this goal.

Your description of how humans try to make sense of randomness reminds me of something I learned in a psychology class while we were talking about entropy. We learned that the main purpose of the human mind is information processing and in a sense, information is the opposite of entropy. The world tends towards chaos, therefore it takes energy to oppose this chaos. I believe that superposition could have been pointing out humans’ ability to oppose entropy through information processing.

After watching superposition I didn’t know what to feel. I felt like I had just witnessed the end of the universe. I had the opportunity to meet the actors before watching the show and they talked a lot about the contrast between the human and technological elements of the performance. This contrast became very apparent while I watched the show. I noticed that scenes where the humans were present, everything was much more organized. The Morse code scenes, the marble scene, and the crossword scene, for example, were all relatively calm and well put together. However, as soon as the humans left the stage, everything started going haywire, culminating in the explosion of light at sound that ended the show and terrified me. This distinction between humans and machines made me wonder if the humans were slaves to the computers or if the humans only existed because of the computers. This question of who controls whom is a problem that I think plagues our own society. People are so dependent on technology in today’s world that it’s hard to imagine a life without it, but at the same time, technology would never exist without humans.
superposition brought up many other issues besides human versus machine. It presented conflicts like science versus religion and order versus chaos. However, these topics felt somewhat under developed. The phrases that were typed out by the actors like “science is a differential equation” and “religion is a boundary condition” were complex and hard to follow and they switched between topics so quickly that it seemed, at times, that they were complex for the sake of being complex and not to make an actual point.