Pueblos alfareros

The research has tracked a journey from inside a labyrinth, in the darkness trying to decipher the theatrical parables transmitted by the Renaissance movement with only a few twinkles of light to guide us through the edge of a communicative field. Stumbling out into the realm of experiential prototyping, into an abyss of jumbled codes, cables and knots that on inspection contained hidden meanings and multidimensional perceptions. With my bare hands I gradually pulled apart the tangled webs, found myself walking on the hard wooden boards, in a vast black box theatre. I discovered myself sitting as a performer with my back to audience, unraveling the reader, writer, programmer, maker and user. Re writing these roles, this friction caused a fire. I moved into the stage wings, past the bulk of velvet curtains, and down to the guts of a labyrinth, into the square of the Grand Rue slum in Port-au-Prince. I found myself twisted in a mortal coil of bedsprings, sequins, beer bottle tops, and discarded

components. An a surveillance device, under the guise of an oil container, led me to a pirate map from the sixteenth century, and with this I navigated my way out through the maze, to discover myself contemplating and substantiating the power of suspending one’s disbelief. From this position, I evaluated how the objects created by our

embodied thought shift in tandem with the technologies that in return engage our senses, our inner veracity.

The fieldwork in Haiti was seminal in galvanising the view that talismans and paraphernalia run on transformative paths different from those of use and function.

Transfigured by mere possibility, the rules of the mundane gave way to collaborative,

experiential learning models, in order to explore radical modes of aesthetic engagement where the prototype may occasionally bend and alter the very nature of the system within which it is embedded. This in turn generates unanticipated ripples and on-flows of influence far beyond the maker’s intent. The key terms ‘performance of code’ and the ‘aesthetics of transmission’ were developed and considered rather than a strictly technical definition but what the provoke and which in turn challenged the

mechanisms of domination, where the rational is the sole criteria for quality. The propositions addressed gave prominence to our bizarre behaviour patterns,

into our rigid and deeply rooted worldview, costuming essentialist identification in favour of awareness.

The Renaissance thinkers and scholars, artists and Critical Engineers that have been discussed, bring with them this distinction and the peculiarity of mysterious and illusionistic phenomena in their contradictory combinations of playful dream and satire. The term ludibrium has been revitalised to offer a specific competence to prepare and sharpen the mind towards the deceptions that trap our perceptions and desires in the theatricalisation of knowledge through the pervasiveness of computing. In the performance of code, technical changes and elaborations are revealed and bring with them many possibilities. Further, it has been revealed how technical consideration of the apparatus as both tool and a theatrical medium is generated and the condition in which human beings are located – an open-ended, ever variable trajectory – unwraps, rather than the fixed and regulated machines often characteristic of the consumer world. Aesthetically exploiting these otherwise closed systems, techné pays heed to those dimensions that are not governed by the imperatives of use and efficiency. In the future, such policies might be abandoned as an impediment to understanding.

With this perceptual shift (or cypher key of ludibrium), the infinite potential of a theatre machine can be re-engineered, and our ability to experience the unfathomable can be nurtured. Radical subjectivity and the methodologies of risk have been

discussed in relation to accounts of experiential play and the forms of artful elusiveness. These dynamic practices reveal a terrain where there exists no clear determination of individual responsibility, but instead a social process engaged in theatrical, performative relationships. This has been developed and addressed through a range of informative pedagogies, technologies, entities and activities. The thesis has advanced the proposition of how performance can help us understand the aesthetic relations between immaterial and embodied experience and how such executions of code may be invocations with reference to jouissance profusion and ivresse.

A methodology of risk, and a mindful approach to such possibly dangerous states, carves out a new territory for us to exist in by excavating an old territory from our previous existence. Yates reminds us that the Renaissance movement was ‘not abandoning the past for the future but seeing the future as a child of the past…’ and

yet ‘created new forms of art and thought and culture’ (Yates 1975, p. 12). Raising new problems by solving old ones – the concept that the works in the thesis reflect – is not comforting. But it is my hope that they are eccentrically beautiful, jouissant

inexplicably and transgressive.

To illuminate the ethos underpinning the research, a systematic account on the

effectiveness of dramaturgy that underpins the research project. An exploration of the black box of the computer and of theatre through the development of the artworks in a white cube has revealed how knowledge of staging and performing are central to a rejection of closed, hierarchical and hence exclusive systems of knowledge. Bringing dramaturgy to the interaction between machines and their audiences is easily

overlooked in consumer accounts, which base their conception and analysis purely on a technological pragmatism or even the vulgar expression of evaluating a theatre work with regard to the mercantile colloquialism : ‘bums in seats’. In our endeavor to be meaningful, we limit the set of our potential actions by casting our calculating machines into purely utilitarian roles. However, the expressive use of the black box never completely justifies its procedures, a meaning of which we can never be sure has escaped us. This echoes the paradox of the black plastic rectangular oil container that appeared and blossomed in the ghetto of Grand Rue, Port-au-Prince.