 How's the weather? It's hot. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty hot. How did you sit? Oh, did you sit? What's your name? I don't know. How did you sit? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. ABCD. ABCD. Stay clean out of there somewhere. I mean, okay. Q&A. I do want to acknowledge that our composer, Tina and I, have all the beautiful music we've heard. He's a student in recovery. He wrote the response. Also, because I'm terrible at copying. So, what you all have just experienced is a narrative game inspired by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which, when you take that principle, extrapolate it to the greatest scale, holds that there is a fundamental limit to the precision with which we can know the world. And, as some of you know, though you began the game, you had a technical sense of instructions. There were, in fact, five different versions of the game running simultaneously. Plus, the added uncertainty of buffering and technical difficulties. So, you did not know what others were going through or what was going on. So, we're at the outset. I don't know Heisenberg better than I do. You definitely know it differently and are likely better. I'm asking you to provide a critical response. Tonight, Genevieve asked me to do something peculiar. To say something about a piece that I had never experienced that might be interesting to a group of people who had liking peculiar tasks like that S. And in doing the things that one does to prepare a response, talking to Jenny, looking at images, reading a script, listening to the music in a voice, I realized that I now have never actually experienced Heisenberg because of doing all of those things I entered the narrative function. That is, much though not all of the games emotional and intellectual content requires not knowing the rules specifically that there are many sets and figuring this out or not as we go. So, I'm going to use this time to follow a trail of texts, ideas, events and non-events that led to your being here at the beginning of time. Hopefully, these considerations will suggest some things that you might be curious to hear about. I'm going to use this time to follow a trail of texts, ideas, events and non-events that led to your being here at the beginning of time. So, I'm going to suggest some things that you might be curious to hear more from Jenny about during the journey. Does that sound good to everyone? Great. I'll give you some smaller, formal considerations and finally just some larger sociopolitical ones. Also, my talking points are going to move from the longest to shortest, so don't worry. The smallest consideration, one of them is large for me as something like a literary critic who has himself been narrowing her function. Is it God, Gemini, Amelia Earhart, the laws of thermodynamics? There's this shift in pronouns that occurs early on in Heisenberg that makes the question of the narrative even more pressing. The voice begins as a personal we who invites you into the game and then rather quickly becomes a lie. That is, it quickly becomes personal. One thing Gemini mentioned, it sounds surprising that the game tends to unfold is that even though in the beginning you are all invited to obey the instructions as you wish, most people, most of you obey other people, either you forgot that you could do otherwise, or you did not wish to. Gemini noted that even people who are very unusual in their everyday life, people who do not follow the usual social rules, follow the rules of the game. Gemini thinks this has something to do with how humans have to move situations, but I wonder how much this has to do with the narrative I, experiencing power not as distant and impersonal of course, like the tax code, the computer code, social code, but instead as this intensely intimate relation. But, okay, so that is already kind of an aggression. The question I started with was who or what is the narrative Heisenberg? One answer is suggested by a text that when we were talking, Gemini said that we were talking about Heisenberg solidifying their imagination. Itao Calvino selected short stories about Cosmic Comics. So Calvino was a Cuban, Italian, communist writer who spent World War II first secretly reading India's literature, then hiding from conscription, and then fighting as a member of the Italian resistance. Cosmic Comics was published later in the 1960s, and like Heisenberg it uses scientific hypothesis statements and theories as impetus for playful but heartbreaking meditations on the problems, possibilities, and consequences of being in relation to each other. In Calvino's stories the fact that the moon used to be closer to her and is slowly being pushed away by the force of the tides which the moon in turn creates. In his stories, this sort of fact is played out as a scene of a perfectly unreciprocated love triangle. Also in his stories the big bang occurs because of an incredibly generous impulse right, so like what happened when you all were like I want more space in these stories what happens is somebody says okay I'm going to give you more space and then they have the universe. I like to think that the narrator at least Calvino's stories is also the narrator at Heisenberg. The narrator in his stories is giving this like absurd, unpronounceable name it's spelled Q F W F Q Q So this unpronounceable narrator like Jehani guides us through the beginnings and ends of things and though this unpronounceable narrator is not reliably or perhaps ever human there's sort of charming force with the strangeness of the physical world helps readers see and bear the strangeness of the human world. The influence of positive comments on Heisenberg in turn leads to a set of questions about what it means to take form of a literary object and turn it into a game that is meant to be so as an example over and over again in these stories Calvino foregrounds the problem of trying to wring on human phenomena into human scales. So you have this unpronounceable narrator who's being therefore you as a leader can't quite grasp you can't even say his name so how are you going to figure out what he is right? But this also happens in the stories in sort of anxious meta statements about the ability of human technologies of stimuli and personification utterly in human states. So to explain and be stories of what it was like for the Big Bang when all of matter was condensed into a single subatomic point this narrator offers a literary image of being packed in like certificates. But then he immediately qualifies this by saying in reality there wasn't even space to pack us into. Every point of each of us coincided with every point of each of the others as a single point which is where we all were. So you know like a good pre-post-modernist repeatedly is pointing to the failure of language to translate experience. But although Heisenberg uses similar techniques the difference is that personification is much more literal. You're all actually invited to become the small stuff of the universe which requires suspending not forfeiting this anxiety of translation. This is personification brought out of a literary device and into a performance device. And I think that this is interesting, right? Suspending anxiety about incremental ability in order to make it gain which is in a fundamental way about incremental ability. So long thread cut very short we might be curious together about the narrator which leads us to a curiosity about the relationship between Heisenberg and Heisenberg which might lead to a question for Gemini about how they went about making an allegory come to life. A sexual experiment in making it in their body experience. Okay. Consideration 2 continues the theme of movement across mediums, though this time what's moving is not a form but an artist. I've known Gemini for six or seven years something like that. When we first met we were on a slam poetry team together and then after that Gemini was one half of a kind of spoken word and this means that for years until now the performance work has involved their body on stage and as some of you might have noticed in this work Gemini's body's noticeably absent is literally off to Sabbath. I think that the body of the vapor is also a noticeable absence in Heisenberg when you put it alongside other kinds of similar performances. I don't play video games, so that means that my frame of conference for Heisenberg includes pieces like Marina from Bitches for the Zero. So this is the sort of famous performance art piece where the artist lays definitely two objects out on its table ranging from a piece of bread to a loaded gun and instructing the audience to use them longer as they're hired. So right now you're invited to play this game to the extent that you will this artist invited her or audience to use these objects as they desire. And famously in Rhythm Zero things began like peacefully and ended with someone holding the loaded gun to the artist's head while other members of the public banded together to protect her from violence. So the kinds of payoffs that unfold in both of these performances have quite different states. But at the same time it's true that both Rhythm Zero and Heisenberg are interested in what the public will do given a set of conditions. Both of these pieces take the forms of games that attempt to figure the public out. Though Rhythm Zero obviously is a game of many human rules. Another difference is that in Rhythm Zero the body the maker's body becomes the object of the performance is actually the situation whereas in Heisenberg the maker's body is nowhere to be found. When I asked them about this shift in medium Jenny told me that after all those years on stage they had grown weary of the dynamic that the audience performed or intends to produce. They were tired of standing literally on a pedestal being expected to be an authority to be somehow fully formed. One for them hard making is about exploration bumbling play. So rather than continuing to work in a way that led people to view them as authority they wanted to find an art fact as that invited others to build a world with them. I wonder then if Jenny's strategy and a promise which is the accenting of the body in favor of the voice and the presenting of the body with no voice are two ways of managing the same problem. The problem of suspending authority long enough to draw the public who are used to keeping distance out and into the work to actually become the work. If Jenny were to be playing the game alongside you I wonder would you have all the hate in the same way? Finally, consideration three. Isabaric represents one response to the election of Donald Trump. Jenny dated up two days after the election as they walked around in New York listening to people, presumably friends and strangers and journalists expressing the wilderness about how such a thing had come to pass. Specifically the simple wilderness about what reality was like for those who could vote for him. While inevitably much of our good sharing class set out to understand to bridge the gaps Heidegger begins with a premise that there are in fact fundamental limits of precision but we can know the realities of others even though those realities run into a pin-john in the middle of our own. Rather, Heidegger picks this incredibly or perhaps pessimistic thesis and makes it something generative and playful and it builds a world. It asks how knowing this we might do and continue to live and dream on the side of one another. In our conversations Jenny pointed out to me that the making of Heidenberg also accomplished his pedagogical aims because it made him a piece in collaboration with musicians and audio engineers. Artists whose language Jenny doesn't quite see. It gave them a greater appreciation for how artists and other means think. But rather than sitting down to learn these new language new languages reducing the gap between all of these various makers Jenny learned to let go of the need to understand all pieces. That is, Heidenberg is the product of the kind of intimate collaboration. It models one premise on gaps of understanding. And just to close with another sure organic quote for a while and maybe still, I hope still Jenny was making comics. Many, many comics that featured stick figures and were drawn in crime. In one, which is incidentally the image I most associate with Jenny there are two stick figures standing underneath a yellow orange sun. One is in shorts and a sleeveless shirt and the other is bundled in pants with winter coats, scarf and hat. Looking at each other both figures seem slightly below her. The one in short says but it's not cold. The other one says nothing. It reads, please don't minimize my experience. I love to think that these two are our friends, dear friends who have hit upon their own uncertainty principle. Coming to the realization that there is a sharp divergence in their experience and inability to share assumptions about things seemingly as basic as temperature. Like Heidenberg, please don't minimize my experience as silly but various serious meditation on being together. That's the game teaches of how to do to notice the innumerable ways in which we are not all playing by the same rules and to live with the chaos uncertainty, guilt, sadness and the light that ensues. Perhaps even how to incorporate the knowledge of fundamental distances between us into the form started to this day. So, that's what I got. My question to comments concerns I think we'll move into a Q&A Thank you. Thank you. I'm curious if you could divulge at all am I not predicting it? We're straightening. I'm curious if you could divulge at all about the process of creating something like this. Like you were just talking about once you sort of know the story board and the different timelines you can go through. How do you refine what you've done already while keeping the first experience in mind? What was the process of creating the work? So, once I had the idea of how to work I made an outline in a couple of days and then I wrote it in a couple of weeks. It was just one of those moments where it was sort of a big bang type of explosion of work I guess. Then I ended it pretty quickly with more of the work of refining some of the instructions that took a bit longer. So trying to figure out how the different years and the big parts would fit together was the narrative layer was moved down. And then somewhere in the middle of all of that I asked Tina to essentially compose a symphony. Thank you all very much. And Tina we started to do it and we worked with the musical arranger and maybe it doesn't end up with musicians to record the music you heard. I'm saying that it was a very easy thing. I know that was one of the most difficult parts of the process actually. It was a little nerve wracking. It was kind of like leaving college again for me because I was spending a lot of time in basements and pulling all my ears. Except this time when we mentioned musicians we broke people for the most part. I'm not sure what the experience was with. Then we went into the sound studio to mix and master it. If you've not done mixing work before it is the most painstaking surgery you can do to something. So yeah, the thing that started out as this kind of breaking those back of that big idea then came this tiny surgical crochet operation over time. It was great to see a project through. The most ambitious thing I've ever made started to finish because there were maybe three hours of voice over recording in addition to all the music. It also fun fact did the voice over when I was feverishly ill and without stopping. So Tina said for that time I turned into a mandatory because I do not ask for food or water I just for many hours. So that was a lot of fun. So maybe I embodied some of the experience of the album part of the presentation. So yeah, that was the very chaotic idea of the process of creating this work. Thank you. You mentioned Desperga and I wonder where to see this piece occurring in the world. I can tell you about some of my dreams of running into a car. I really wanted to happen inside of billboards. Also an airplane hanger. Old airports or airfields. Any places that are large and strange would be really fun to do it in like a corporate office park or just a skyscraper where you can't open windows. I would also love to do it in museums of natural history or museums in general. Yeah, I mean high schools colleges like places where they can be dating that way. But I also just want to reach audiences that are necessarily within the realm of contemporary art and also those who are. So the answer is everywhere. So long as there is sufficient space in some way to put out some of the work. Then you might know the words that are dead words. You do have some of them. I don't have exact dates for those yet. So also thank you. I'm a person who meditates every day and I'm reading Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astro-Physicist for people in our area. So this was like running my world for a lot of reasons. But I want to ask you a little bit about the five versions of the story. We can talk a little more about how that was created. As in why I created the five versions or how they were... I'm not going to tell you how they're different from one another because I wanted to talk to each other not the other part of the game. Why I created five versions. I think that's just how many there were supposed to be of the game. Yeah, and I imagined it. I was like, yeah, there are five versions. And this is how we laid them down. I think more the more painstaking cast was trying to figure out how to allocate instructions within a particular scene to the various tracks. Some of you within this game also have very special experiences that no one on the other track had. So would you find other people to talk to? I was just wondering what the... you know, we cut off short of the robot voice near the end there. Where's... How can we hear the rest of it? How can we hear the rest of it? We don't. Well, I will... website... For now, I think we can get on to the other list. sleepertrilogy.com So sleeper... sleepertrilogy.com I'll just shout this out. Since you said sleeper trilogy, can you tell everyone a little bit about how this project fits into your multi-disciplinary creative project? Sure. So I'm primarily right now a writer of fiction. So sleeper trilogy is the... So I just finished the first book of that. So that was a project I was working on for some time. Somehow about creating Heisberg. And my current project, I'm working on a book about an octopus and a psychic. In my larger project. I'm interested in making more work about how people exist alongside one another with distance. So I want to make more work that's about like paradox and uncertainty and weird things happening. And without a need to package resolution, but also without necessarily just a bundle of negative feelings. So I like making experiences that are challenging, but also hopefully some way enjoyable. But that's where I'm landing. I'm also very interested in exploring physics and astrophysics as a place to make work from. Right now I've been really interested in I've been this beautiful recipe where I'm apparently the astrophysicist of the planetarium. So these objects that are kind of failed stars other people call the pale stars that are held around the works. And they're not quite stars, they're not quite planets. I'm interested in also those middle things as like post-psychs or things we might think about as like actually a future basis for humanity. In your ideal world, in the start of physics and I, or do you want sort of like a point of view of humanity? Well, I think part of making this very strange work in this medium that barely exists has been letting go of the perfect one, or the idea of the perfect one. Last time we ran it on the island, there was a thunder storm and kind of the old horse winds just up to the minute before we started and we were basically at a fair day cage so the radio waves that we were sending the audio through were all messed up. So I'm going to take a deep breath and remind myself that I'm certain that he is one of the things that I'm actually trying to figure out. Hopefully I can be okay with that for a moment and just let go of my perfectism which has been a very good and wealthy process for me. Yeah, so to me, I don't think there is an ideal world. The ideal world is that people who come to experience it have an experience and take something from it. We've got time for one more question. Do you have a comment? Do you ever think of curating the audience, whether the participants in some way since it is this response to shared reality putting the cold and the hot people together? I would love to do it with all the dinosaurs. I would also love to do it with an audience of like teenagers who are learning business which I think I can actually do at my primary school. I would also love to do it with people who are loosely tied together in some way whether they work in the same organization or they're out of the same profession like a bunch of lawyers playing this game. I mean, it would also be beautiful with a bunch of dancers playing this game. It would be like a pure and sexy experience and no one would ever want to. But, I mean, all kinds of people I think would be really cool as like selected curators and people. I also just love their managers when everyone shows up. The last time we saw them on the high line we had players as long as I think of eight years old and they were honestly the best players because they're very good at every instruction so, genetically, we tell them to do various things and it's like this they won't do the muscle curate. Yeah. Thank you so much. This is exactly why I'm excited to carry a prelude. This is part of the joy of curating is you get to make the festival you want and all I've wanted is this kind of experience to have artists that I love and to have this kind of deep critical thinking which usually is not admitted into the artistic conversation and I'm so thankful for what we brought. This is what we're going to get for the next couple of days and if I can give you a little sort of teaser of how to navigate prelude every day and those workshops are everything from intellectual property law to virtual reality production prompt thinking and Kickstarter campaigns they're free, evidence free we have works in progress by again artists that I'm thrilled by and the idea is the juxtaposition of short samples of what they're working on and then a critical conversation across the three groups we have, how did you make that where I brought together different makers in the field from producers to artists to people who run companies where you, the audience can ask the really practical questions of how did you do that and get a little bit of a better understanding of their craft we have a fantastic panel with Daniel Alexander-Jones on the legacy and the sort of networks of black art performance people color on art performance from its early streets to today and another panel with law and white cultural council looking at where people make work we've done surveys so we can visualize where work is made in New York so there's new graphics and then these studio visits which are sort of my like I said, my own little personal joy which was can I create a space for artists to work to be, they all have to choose who their critical responsibility was and then for you all to have a little bit of a chance to enter into their process so we have four more of those two to one night and two on Friday night and then on Friday night we close out by going to the art world around the barn which is a virtual reality arcade and barn so that's going to happen I have three, it's usually like $15 for a couple of hours and it's great except don't do the burden thing because I almost threw up but it's going to be fantastic and I just have to say from what he has made what the Siebel Center has made is a place where this kind of discourse this kind of passionate engagement with art and scholarship can take place and I don't think it's happening anywhere else so thank you