People Are Talking: UMS presents Ryoji Ikeda’s...
Posted: 10/31/14
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PERFORMANCES & EVENTS
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All comments by Scott Tsangeos
People Are Talking: UMS presents Ryoji Ikeda’s superposition at Power Center:
I agree with your analysis in that it was hard to see how all of the pieces fit together and as someone who likes to search for coherent themes and meanings this was very hard for me. That being said, I do think your enjoyment of Superposition hinges upon your perspective. As you mentioned, it is so easy to get lost in each segment and confuse yourself trying to put them together but really it seems like each part should be viewed as a separate installation that serves as examples of a broader concept. With this mindset I think we both could benefit from seeing the show a second time. All in all I think you did a nice job of summing up what we witnessed to someone who’s brain and ears are still a bit discombobulated after the performance so props to you.
Blinded by strobe lights and kept on edge by music that seemed to emulate a horror movie soundtrack, I found myself uneasily attempting to extract meaning from a performance presented in a language I could not comprehend. Initially, I felt over stimulated by the amount of images that were on the screen at a given time. However, when I stopped trying to focus on the images individually and just let the stream of lights overcome me as a whole, I found the performance to be much more meaningful. Early on in the show the sentence, “everything is written in the immense book of nature which is constantly in before our very eyes” was written on the screen. It continued to explain that unless we have access to the language of nature we cannot understand this book. The entire show paralleled this idea. It constantly seemed to be relaying a deeper message yet, unless the audience had an understanding of computer coding and was able to look at every image at once, it was incomprehensible. The beauty of the show came from the fact that it was always slightly undecipherable. Even when sentences appeared on the screen, there was no spacing between the words, which made it hard to read. There was always the opportunity to understand bits and pieces, but the audience could never grasp the full picture. The whole show seemed to center around giving us several different opportunities to read the definition of “superposition”, yet it never allowed the words to appear fully on the screen. The actors seemed to constantly be highlighting all the missing letters, but never directing the audience to where the letters fit. It’s this incomprehensibility that constantly surrounds us in the natural world and was portrayed in this digital piece. Despite the fact that we make constant improvements in science and technology, the world of nature always remains somewhat out of reach.
"by Maya
People Are Talking: UMS presents Ryoji Ikeda’s superposition at Power Center:
Nothing you read or hear can prepare you for the piece that is Superposition. The futuristic cross between an electronic concert and a hypnosis experiment left me both mesmerized and confused. The images of shifting graphic planes and the visual relationship between two sound waves kept my eyes glued to the screen while simultaneously serving as a break preparing me for when they would have to be laser focused in order to catch the words that passed quickly on the screen.
The biggest thing that Superposition did was facilitate conversation after the show. As soon as my friends and I left the theatre we wanted to increase our knowledge of what “Superposition” actually meant. For those interested it is a complex quantum physics concept that has been explained by Schrödinger’s Cat. Imagine there is a cat in a box that we can’t see and if even one atom of a certain chemical is detected the cat will be killed. But because we cannot see any of this we can’t know if the chemical was detected and the cat was killed making the cat simultaneously dead and alive. This unknown state of life and death serves as the basis for quantum superposition, which applies to all atoms and is mathematically backed.
Now the obvious question is how does this have anything to do with what we witnessed in the show and to be honest I am still not entirely sure. Perhaps the fusion of human input and technology represents this fusion of life and death because we don’t know which one is in control of the other. Then again I could be completely wrong and the beauty of the performance is in its convolution and is purposely made to make us wonder because that is what superposition is currently doing to physicists.