Performance Research Volume 19 Issue 5

On Turbulence

Issue editors: Paul Carter

ISSN: 1352-8165 (2014) 19:5

On Turbulence explores the challenges of complexity in performance. Turbulence is associated with open systems, with networks; it is not simply a ‘complex and unpredictable cultural or physical environment.’ It is the phenomenon of feedback: or, more exactly, it is the self-conscious awareness of the power of feedback mechanisms to inaugurate new behaviours. It is associated with changes of state that appear spontaneous (or unscripted)because they respond to or interact with surface phenomena in real time. As a property of fluid transformation, turbulence is a physical phenomenon but also a psycho-social one. Its foregrounding as a creative principle emancipates the performer, the dramaturge and the audience, but in ways that may bring into question the viability of representations as such. Inevitably, the transgressive or boundary-dissolving character of turbulent formations has political implications: the middle ground between bodies is reconfigured but so is the ownership of the public domain. The ambition of the issue is to build new dialogues between the digital arts and the analog arts and between both of these and the sciences (with particular reference to the ecological sciences whose attributes of creativity, growth, mutation and transformation form such an obvious parallel with the kinds of aesthetic effect that many contemporary practitioners strive to achieve).

Touchez – The Poetics of Turbulence

Paul Carter

pp. 1 - 6

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On turbulence : In between mathematics and performance

Telma João Santos

pp. 7 - 12