Professor Mike Vanden Heuvel Department of Theatre & Drama University of Wisconsin-Madison Bristol Symposium: Technologies of Transmediality

[1] HELLO AND THANK YOU. Im very grateful to Simon Jones for inviting me to Bristol to share my research, but as well to learn about intermediality in other fields brilliant that Simon conceived a conference on transmediality and then thought to make made it intermedial. Im also eager to see the performance by Simons company of Bodies in Flight this evening. And finally, I welcome the opportunity to discuss with others the work they are doing in the field, including Jeff Smith, my colleague from the University of Wisconsin whom Ive not only never met, but whose office on our campus, I determined before leaving, is a full twenty meters from my own. Theres an abundance of very good writing on intermedial performance, and much of it necessarily involves discussion of the actual technology used to stage intermediality. However, little has been said regarding the interaction between intermedial performance and the science that makes it possible not just the science of electrons on which so many media are based, but as well the sciences of information and systems that provide the foundation for media interaction. Meanwhile, there has been a boomlet of plays that address scientific ideas these [2-4] slides just shows a small sampling, and end [5] with reference to Kirsten Shepherd-Barrs and Eva Sabine Zeheleins recent, but very different, books on the subject. So, today Id like to bring intermediality, science, and science plays into dialogue to make a tendentious case regarding their interactions. Ill also try to introduce some new metaphors, drawn from the sciences, into the theorization of intermediality itself.

I draw my title from John Barrows, [6] the Cambridge cosmologist and popular interpreter of some of the more abstruse sciences, who uses the phrase to describe what he considers to be the popular understanding of infinity a concept that will loom large near the end of my paper.

The acceptable face of the unintelligible: Intermediality in the Science Play

Let me begin by setting two scenes in which science and theatre cross paths. The first comes from the early eighteenth century, during a period of widespread uncertainty about what constituted the natural order of creation, as amateur biologists scoured the earth in search of diversity in all manner of flora and fauna. Responding to a new appreciation of Natures tremendous miscellany, they were also promoting a powerful and unsettling body of data that seemed to contradict the Cartesian notion of Nature as a continuous plenum. Instead, these discoveries confirmed that Nature was promiscuous and evinced a lack of order and hierarchy, and could even produce bizarre embodiments and monstrosities.[* 7] Pre-darwinian naturalists, then, were in effect restoring drama to creation by turning mere specimens into species -- incessantly unstable and therefore a challenge to the notion of the fixed natural order. Although spiritually and intellectually traumatizing, such data were also received with great wonder, and soon supplied the content for different forms of theatrical display. These increasingly muddled the sharp distinctions between the empirical gaze of scientific observation and the less formalized gawking of a public curious to

view the latest evidence of Natures whimsy and profusion. Not only did Nature appear theatrical, then, but it also quickly became apparent that this theatricality exceeded conventional forms of dramatic representation. Thus, my first example, the performance of science features, not a play, but an oddity advertised as The Bold Grimace Spaniard, presented at theatres and street fairs around London, most notably at Bartholomew Fair, throughout the seventeenth century.[8] Bold Grimace, it was claimed

lived fifteen years among wild creatures in the mountains, and is reasonably supposed to have been taken out of the cradle as an infant by some savage beast, and wonderfully preserved, until some traveling comedians accidentally passed through those parts, and perceiving him to be of the human race, pursued him back to his cave, where they caught him in a net. [which, as we all know, Comedians of all ages are wont to do]

Once displayed, Bold Grimace performs the following surprising grimaces: he lolls out his tongue a foot long, turns his eyes in and out at the same time, contracts his face as small as an apple, extends his mouth six inches, and turns it into the shape of a birds beak, his eyes like to an owl, then licks his nose with his tongue like a cow.

I call attention not only to the display of phylogenetic hybridity in the performance of Grimace Man (he is man and monster, and the body itself becomes a theatre of surprises), but just as importantly the mixing and hybridity of performance genres and media: for, after he has completed this pantomime, Bold Grimace would sing wonderfully fine while accompanying himself on a lute. The layering of physical acting, song and

music, as well as the deployment of an ethnographic frame pushes the performance beyond the popular fairground display by embedding a quasiscientific, even educational, element to the proceedings; and yet, by virtue of the grotesque display, the lack of a narrative trajectory, and the mixing of media, the content of the performance could not be appropriately represented in a conventional middlebrow theatrical form such as comedy, tragedy or even opera. Spectators were thus witnessing not just the performance of a natural monstrosity: they were seeing it in the guise of a recognizable, but at the same time thoroughly mongrel, performance form, the variety show. My second example of theatrical engagement with science emerges from the consequences of the long nineteenth century, of Linnaean taxonomy and positivist science. [9] Michael Frayns Copenhagen, [first produced in 1998 and revised in 2000] is regularly judged to be, along with Stoppards Arcadia, the most successful science play in the canon. In the exemplary scene Ive selected, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr is discussing, along with his wife, Margrethe, and his colleague Werner Heisenberg, the so-called Uncertainty Principle, which limits knowledge of the dynamics of subatomic particles according to the means by which one selects to perceive them -- that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. [10: scene]

Margrethe: It was the cloud chamber that finished you. Bohr: Yes, because if you detach an electron from an atom, and send it through a cloud chamber, you can see the track it leaves. Heisenberg: And its a scandal. There shouldnt be a track! Margarethe: According to your quantum mechanics.

Heisenberg: There isnt a track! No orbits! No tracks or trajectories! Only external effects! [ and then, just a bit further on, Heisenberg continues] And thats when I did uncertainty. Walking around Faelled Park on my own one horrible raw February night. I start to think about what youd see, if you could train a telescope on me from the mountains of Norway. Youd see me by the street lamps on the BLEG-dams-fey, then nothing as I vanished into the darkness, then another glimpse of me as I passed the lamppost in front of the bandstand. And thats what we see in the cloud chamber. Not a continuous track but a series of glimpses a series of collisions between the passing electrons and various molecules of vapor water.

[11] And just to help visually, here are images of what Heisenberg describes, neutrons being tracked through cloud chambers

In the two examples we witness distinctively different performative and discursive modes through which scientific ideas and objects are represented for a general audience. In the first, a popular theatrical form engages with biological variety in a haphazard, intermedial, and even mischievous manner. *Jane Goodall, from whose Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order I draw my example of Bold Grimace, writes that, whereas nineteenth-century science controlled the parameters of enquiry in order to stabilize a model of knowledge, popular discourses could engage in explorations without a map, exercising the freedom to invent as well as observe. what emerges is a picture of eager even over-eager receptiveness to new ideas from the realms of science, a fascination with their implications and an alertness to

changing directions of speculation, albeit with a cavalier attitude toward comprehension. This of course sounds very like the reader engaged with Jerome McGanns radiant hypertext as well as the spectator of intermediality. And, although Goodall does not analyze such theatricalizations as intermedial, she makes the case that the destabilizing forms of knowledge embedded in such performances exceed the conventions of traditional character- and narrative-based theatre. Rather, the popular performance modes of the street pantomime and variety theatre are the appropriate vehicles for embodying what she terms the alert skepticism and sense of the ludicrous that popular performers and their audiences enacted when responding to, literally, new bodies of knowledge; using, in Goodalls apt phrase, the anarchic rules of humbug. In stark contrast to an engagement with new scientific ideas that fosters loose play and active speculation, the second scene Ive abstracted gives us a glimpse of how conventional theatre has come to embody science. While I strongly admire the ingenuity and the artfulness of plays like Frayns and Stoppards, I am mindful of the ways that science is stretched to fit their particular canvases. [12] In the case of Copenhagen, a well-read playwright first researched thoroughly both the sciences and the historical contexts which undergird the action of his play. He arranged these in a mostly-realistic theatrical style, even though the play is framed as a postmortem discussion and the sciences under discussion involve the new and counter-intuitive understanding of physical nature as discontinuous and indeterminate. Moreover, the characters are vested with intellectual authority, capable of comprehending and articulating the scientific ideas they espouse -- even though we can be quite certain the actors do not. The

plays plot trajectory is mostly linear, with the exception that a single scene is replayed three times from different vantage points of memory. And finally, the action develops in a unified and unmediated visual space, expressed continuously in three-dimensions, and the audiences focus is consistently drawn to this stage world as the representation of a reality we understand to be authentic. Vital to this illusion and to the interrogation of history and memory is the burden of making the science that undergirds the play comprehensible to the extent it can convey its potent metaphors effectively. Frayn even worked, during his revision of the play, with scientific consultants to be certain he did a credible job of getting the science right because he thought he had not originally achieved a convincing level of accuracy. [13: this actually became a bit absurd, with both historians and scientists crying fowl that Frayn had misrepresented his subject and Frayn defending himself as a result, not only have a number of books been published about these debates, but now the Afterword to the play is longer than the drama itself]. Thus, far from cultivating Goodalls cavalier attitude toward comprehension, Frayns play positions its scientific content as not only relatively comprehensible, but more importantly as an anterior form of knowledge that stands in a superior position to the impure expressions of memory and history that muddle our lives and keep our more worldly truths in dismal relation to those of science. That is, while uncertainty functions positively and productively on the level of quantum theory, all other forms of indeterminacy are expressed as debilitating forms of historical and mnemonic trauma. I hope these two examples may indicate a range within which possible interactions between theatre and science may occur. We might characterize

the difference as variety vs. veracity, the former defining not just the popular performance style of the variety show that shaped Bold Grimaces presentation of biology but also the open-ended, indeterminate, and partial comprehension it engenders. This stands, it seems to me, in strong contrast to the will toward veracity imposed upon playwrights and performance practitioners today, who often straight-jacket even the most counter-intuitive scientific concepts into the drama of character and ideas and their predominantly realist structure. This situation seems particularly disabling given that today we understand how science itself, in its post-classical phase, by its very nature often supersedes conventional forms of narrative explanation, visualization, and comprehension. [14] Once the ontological principle of material continuity was undermined with the arrival of atomic chemistry via Dalton at the outset of the 19th century, the sciences, almost without exception, began to move away both from the strictly Newtonian, deterministic understanding of physical processes and the sense that Nature could be understood through knowledge that was stable, certain, and complete. And this is not a feature restricted only to the strange subatomic realm of quarks and leptons: On the macro scale, physics became problematic when Newtonian laws are used to explain any form of action-at-a-distance and these include the fundamentals of gravity, electromagnetic fields, light, radiation and, preeminently, heat. Once that final phenomenon was understood, the Newtonian paradigm becomes a parochial concept and must make room for a post-classical physics based on new principles. [parse book cover] The new vision of nature, as Ilya Prigogine was to write, is undergoing a radical change toward the multiple, the temporal and the

complex. [15] In terms of multiplicity, what is displaced is the assurance that physical processes, and the laws used to describe them, are reversible: what takes its place is the realization that as we move forward in irreversible time, everything is transformed and nature is in a perpetual state of becoming; therefore the older metaphor of the continuously-cycling cosmic mechanism as an emblem of stability no longer universally applies. Temporality is thus already implicated, but Prigogine goes further to describe how temporality also entailed a realization that change and transformation could only be described in statistical and probabilistic form. The predictions of the behavior of subatomic matter that science can make are limited only to what an ensemble of phenomena will do with statistical regularity, and not the behavior of individual entities. With the scientific gaze now forced to blink as in Heisenbergs recollections of his walk -- the underlying notion that objects and physical processes could be seen, steadily and whole from some privileged point of view at a particular moment is undermined, taking with it notions of classical objectivity as well the scopic regime on which this is founded. Finally, regarding the movement from the simplicity of the mechanistic model to the complex, Prigogine is short-handing everything from the breakdown of proportionality in the measure of entropy to the quantum notion that reality is complex and to some degree incommensurable, and on to the discoveries, in chaos theory, of complex patterns in seemingly random systems. Embedded in his claim is the significant realization that matter and information are subtly but ubiquitously intertwined that, in other words, the same processes that caused entropy, instability, and uncertainty in physical processes were operating in informational exchanges as well, and that, vice-versa, the same processes by

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which orderly messages emerge out of noise in information channels govern the indeterminate materialization of self-organizing systems in the physical world. With continuity and predictability on the decay, we are only a small step from the strange, complex and causeless universe in which we live. Collectively, then, post-classical science has recovered the knowledge of how instability and even chance determine the evolution of biological, physical, and informational systems: and so the challenge in the arts is to find the forms and phenomenologies adequate to representing and embodying these concepts. And exactly those scientific ideas that have established an indelible purchase on the contemporary imagination as evidenced by their appearance across all the arts show the most intractable resistance to conventional representation everything on the slide, plus the paradoxes of infinity and the chimeric hybrids of transgenetics, to name only a few. And yet these are most often depicted through conventional dramatic narratives and modes of presentation. [16] The result, in the vast majority of science plays, is a depressing focus on biographical storylines that either confirm or critique a given scientific idea. Even more distressing in these works is the conventional positioning of the spectator in what Robin Nelson calls contemplation at a distance. In the sense that such theatre is built on the model of a neutral (and passive) observing eye feeding the mind, it replicates the scopic paradigm of classical science. As Steven Best paraphrases: the unbiased scientific mind confronts the cosmos in a detached mode of observation, passively receiving sense impressions rather than actively shaping the understanding of the world, and translucently bringing this knowledge to consciousness through an exact process of linguistic designation. Science plays in this mode reproduce, through the relational positioning of subjects and objects, the pleasure of the

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very sciences they dramatize to master physical reality and its laws of operation. If this indeed the case, I believe that what operates here is a process of revisionist reclamation: the stories conveyed in these traditional dramatic forms enact an almost therapeutic recuperation of just that scopic regime that post-classical science has displaced with the multiplied, faceted Eye required to comprehend Prigogines vision of the multiple, temporal, and complex. Thus, in addition to telling some ripping good stories about science and scientists, the vast majority of science plays position the spectator so as to recreate the illusion of the knowing Cartesian subject. In addition to much else, I think this reveals the actual trauma felt as a result of the loss of ontological continuity in the wake of post-classical science, and serves notice of a rearguard action in the arts to imaginatively halt the transition of scientific knowledge away from the more commonsensical, and to many less threatening, Newtonian paradigm toward the uncertain and impure science that emerges in the wake of the mathematical monstrosities of Cantors infinities, and from quantum theory, chaos theory and complexity theory. Under these circumstances, it requires a massive imaginative act, on the order of Copenhagen or Arcadia, to effect even a slight wobble of the Newtonian mechanical top. Without, I hope, sounding too glib, we might say that the unsettling consequences of the post-classical sciences have become, to the nonscientist, the Abject of the scientific Symbolic order. These monstrosities are cast out because they cannot be defined or contained by a mathesis derived from stable categories built upon fixed binaries. [17] The space of abjection, as Kristeva defines it, is similarly a liminal state between object and subject -- alive, yet not. Moreover, to view the Abject from within the Symbolic

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order is to invite trauma, as when one confronts the corpse of a loved one -a subject that is on its way to becoming into an object. One can play up the horror of the monstrous vision, as Frayn does with the indeterminacy of history and memory in Copenhagen, or one can try to reclaim it and render it less horrible. To bring the scientific Abject back into the Symbolic order means, in fact, to restage it in such a way that the unruliness of its semiotic boundarylessness is contained and rendered pure again (which I think is Stoppards strategy in Arcadia). Only then can the Abject be said to have a stable identity, and to function as a speaking subject. I have taken some time to make these points about the altered nature of scientific knowledge in general because it seems to me they parallel, in rather startling ways, the emergence of intermediality itself, particularly intermedial performance. So, after parsing some of those similarities, I will provide examples of science theatre that, rather than using dramaturgical means to cast out or contain the Abject of science, instead foster the experience of multiplicity, temporality and complexity. Having implied just now that an Abjected science would lose its voice by virtue of being cast out from the Symbolic, I can qualify that to say that its language would be something like the Kristevan chora, which though chaotic and unstable, non-narrative in its way, is felt by the prelinguistic child as absolutely authentic and expressive of fundamental pleasures and drives. A fundamental characteristic of intermedial theatre, of course, is the manner by which it cannot tell its stories straight: [18 and the next couple of slides are from a performance of the Feuilleton Companys The Case of Sophia K]. Intermediality, as well as immersion and interactivity, de-stabilize and supplement the conventions of narrative-based theatre. By virtue of the

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multiple realities potentially present on stage at a given moment, and the asynchronous temporal frames allowed by digital recording, live feed, and real time data manipulation, as well as the live performer, the spectator is meant to be absorbed in story structures and time continua that are relatively unframed, nonlinear and recursive.[19] The scopic strategy is not focus, but what Andy Lavender terms polyattentiveness, and the igniting of cognitive processes that foster not only the linear process of causal entailment but as well linkages, flows, and networks. We can observe these strategies even in work that, although using multimedia technologies in its presentation, maintains a strong commitment to narrative and character, and, in that fundamental sense are not wholly intermedial. The best work of this sort emerges from Complicite,[20] the London-based company whose performances of *Mnemonic (1999) and A Disappearing Number (2007) have been ably analyzed by Shepherd-Barr and Liliane Campos as pushing at the edge of what theatre scholars call, perhaps inevitably, postdramatic theatre. Similar in many ways to intermedial theatre, such work is characterized in part by its exploration of new, multilayered structures of storytelling and the intensification of semiotic density through the use of video, audio and projection technologies. Both Complicite pieces incorporate post-classical science [21] in Mnemonic we have a humorous lecture on fractal mapping as it relates to memory* as well as references to neurobiology and a sustained critique of the scientific gaze. [22] A Disappearing Number centers on the human fascination with infinity and the manner by which a shared passion for the aesthetics of partition functions brought together the noted British mathematician G. H. Hardy and the Indian savant Srinivasa Ramunujan. But both explore, metaphorically and intermedially, the uncertainty,

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discontinuity and incommensurability that lies at the root of these sciences. A Disappearing Number, in particular, [23] explores the fragmentation of unitary thought, character and narrative: the mathematics of partition functions is embodied in scenes of isolation, and the use of actual partitions on stage to separate friends, lovers, and numbers [23, 24] The play also makes brilliant use of sound design [25] based in tabla music, a percussion style grounded in very rigorous mathematical calculations that produce complex patterns that emerge slowly out of seemingly random noise. A Disappearing Number also uses projections [26] of mathematical symbols on to, and around, the bodies of the characters in ways that, as Campos observes, suggest the interaction between abstraction and material reality. In this way, intermedial theatre stages contemporary sciences recognition of the interrelationships among matter, energy and information by literally bringing the information-bearing technology on stage staging intermediality, as Kattenbelt and Lavender have proposed -- and rendering visible the transformations that reshape matter as well as information and history when 1s and 0s are manipulated. With Complicite, this often aligns with themes of mortality and death, referencing the entropic potential in both information and matter. However, the very dissipation of orderly information and energy becomes, in the paradox of self-organizing systems, the surprising source of new patterns of complex order and meaning. A similar investigation of the informatics of matter has also become a mainstay in the sophisticated body of work [27] produced by Jean-Francois Peyrets Feuilleton Du company (known as TF2) in Paris.* In collaboration with scientists like Alan Prochiantz, a French neurobiologist, and Luc Steels, who works in artificial intelligence, the companys work investigates the

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capricious stages of artistic and scientific creativity [28] the gaps and stutters that are retroactively abjected from the positivist narrative of scientific discovery and progress. Rather than rehashing a story of the heroic scientists personal struggle for Truth, plays like the massive Darwin Variations combine textual fragments not only from Darwin but Milton, Wordsworth, and especially Kafka (specifically the address by the monkey, Red Peter, to the Academy). [29] The effect is to disperse the biographical subject across multiple voices and even across the human/simian divide. When performers speak, [30] electronic tones mimic, in Shepherd-Barrs description, both their registers and the duration and quality of their vowels, further splitting the phonocentric presence of the speakers and rendering speech and information as much an aesthetic object as a form of communication. In TF2s typically oblique form of the reve, the dream reverie of scientific creativity that, in Peyrets words, allows the audience to listen to the music [of scientific thought]The Darwin Variations asks, out of what matter may information emerge and how is information itself constitutive of matter? In the last installment of Darwin, [31] a humorous though provocative image of information and matter is realized when a female performer places a cabbage looking very much like an exteriorized brain in her mouth, obscuring her head, until a male figure arrives to peel if off and devour it. [32, 33, 34] Just a couple more images of their work, the reversal or turnaround of Galileo for a sense of the visual aesthetic In TF2s work, emphasis is placed on the manifestation and experience of just what most science plays leave out as being undramatic the creative and liminal moments between discovery, when information has

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not codified into a new scientific law or text. Those science plays based in traditional narrative Peyret feels to be unworthy of the genre: in an interview with Shepherd-Barr, he calls Copenhagen faux theatre and theatre de la morgue, arguing that if audiences want to know whether Heisenberg was good or bad, they have access already to the scientific debates if they want them: they dont have to come to see a play. We dont have to do night school. Intermedial performance avoids analogy with night school, particularly, I believe, because it is crafted to sustain itself as an open system, that is, one of those entropy-denying entities whose defining feature is their far-from equilibrium state. [35: here as an example we have the cycling of the hydrosphere, a massive open system.] Because they fluctuate nonlinearly, open systems draw in energy and information from their environment and have the capacity to unexpectedly alter their behavior and self-organize in more complex patterns. Im strongly drawn to the notion of Prigogines dissipative structure [36] in regard to intermediality, as I think the oxymoron indicates important aspects of the resensibilisation of perception that Kattenbelt and others have hinted at suggestively when they locate the efficacy of intermediality within the affective and cognitive processes of the observer. In my final example of the intermedial science play, these processes are I think active in distinctive and complex ways.[37] Infinities emerged from a collaboration between the director Luca Ronconi and John Barrow, who devised the script from scraps of his own writings as well as fragments from Georg Cantor, Nietzsche, Hawking, Borges, Alan Lightman, Marcus Aurelius and others. Ronconi, who developed the work in conjunction with

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Milans Teatro Piccolo in 2002, staged it environmentally in a vast warehouse [38] where La Scala has their massive sets painted. This dcor allowed space to be treated as a dramatic element equal to or greater in significance to language or the actors. [39] This became especially apparent in the first section of the performance, entitled Hilberts Hotel in reference to the mathematical paradoxes of infinity first formalized by the mathematician David Hilbert. [39] Here, a hotel manager in the immense space computes how to accommodate an infinite number of guests in an infinite number of rooms (which sounds like an easy task, but given the complexities of infinity, it turns out not only to be impossible, but quite likely the catalyst for the end of the universe). [40] The concierge, now split into two actors, presents his speculations, first agitatedly,[41, 42] then while languidly laying across the top of a large LED screen, on which various inscriptions that mathematize and visualize the paradoxes appear. ]In other rooms, actions are performed simultaneously and repeatedly so that spectators can view them in whatever order they choose. In another room, the theoretical implications of the self-reflexivity of language and infinite textuality [43] explored in Borgess Library of Babel are played out in a [44] mirrored maze of drawers and bookshelves rising several stories, and through which the spectators are invited to roam [45] followed by the voices of the performers -- who may suddenly appear before you, [46] half-masked and dressed identically to invoke the Duplication Paradox, which, in an infinite universe, assures us that no individuality can exist. Another room [47] depicts a Cantor-like figure, covered with gauze in a wheelchair, undergoing an abusive therapy session [48] to explore the consequences of bipolarity and depression caused by his ruminating too long on the nature of different kinds of infinities. Nearby, [49] silent actors move in patterns that

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suggest neither beginning nor end; and in another performers [50] discuss what life would be like with no future, no present. Spectators try one sequence, others double back to experience Hilberts Hotel or another scene multiple times. [51] We must leave at home traditional notions of character, story and plot, and the idea of continuous attention from the audience, says Ronconi: This kind of theatre is looking for hypotheses, rather than starting with them. We dont know the final answer. The actors arent above the audience they dont understand the text that well themselves, and certainly not the math. To get to the essence of the scientific ideas, all biography is left aside, all explanatory armature left incomplete and partial, all the sciences asperity and difficulty using Ronconis phrase is left to be experienced through a complex intermedial matrix. I have tried to make a case that when post-classical scientific concepts meet intermediality, a more fitting alignment of content, form and performance style is achieved. The work I have been describing seeks to immerse audiences intermedially in an experience of temporal, spatial, and epistemological realities that post-classical science seeks to explain only abstractly and conceptually. The experience of the audience becomes more a direct confrontation with the science, including (like Bold Grimaces performance of evolution) all its promiscuousness and bizarre embodiments. By nature of the abstruse scientific concepts being deployed in such work, the presentations are often themselves fragmented, partial, nebulous, many-layered and incomplete in a word, intermedial. I have a longer conclusion that Ill not suffer you to bear in which, having begun with the monstrous and theatricalized body of Bold Grimace

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Spaniard, I evoke that grotesque body once more to argue that science theatre works like The Darwin Variations and Infinities (as well as other examples) replicate in some manner what Goodall called, exploration without a map. The cartography of that body of knowledge is active, temporalized, and irregular, providing the networked passageways that allow a spectator to traverse the landscape with what Goodall describes as alertness to changing directions of speculation, albeit with a cavalier attitude toward comprehension. As science plays continue to explore forms of scientific thought in which uncertainty, paradox, infinity and incompleteness are embedded in the very fabric of the inquiry -- sciences that marry intuition and powerful imagery like those we see in quantum science, [52] Feynman diagrams, n-dimensional and fractal geometries [53, 54] and complex networks [55] for instance one can only hope that playwrights will not be shackled to traditional narrative and compositional strategies in the project of making provocative and even disorienting ideas clear and easily consumable. So much of the scientific joy in creativity and its almost theatrical dedication to improvisatory thought would thereby be stunted or even lost. Pirandello suggested playfully that truth doesnt have to be plausible but fiction does. Intermedial theatres of science have the capacity to take us to a realm where scientific concepts are experienced for what they truly are: BOTH true AND dazzlingly implausible.

Thank you.