I think I had a breakthrough about UV tonight.
I was listening to Terry Gross interview a physicist about the real possibility of parallel universes. It's crazy, listen to it here.
I was listening to Terry Gross interview a physicist about the real possibility of parallel universes. It's crazy, listen to it here.
Suddenly I had a thought – what if Uncanny Valley isn't based on sense memories from childhood – what if it's our sense memories from an alternate childhood? An alternate/parallel universe?
This is akin to the “H2M alternate history” idea. But I feel like it goes deeper – alternate history not just as a wacky other version of our past, but a version of what could have happened – and maybe is happening, alongside us. Suddenly the twin/aliens make sense to me – they aren't the embodiment of our past, they are alternate selves, existing alongside us, suddenly made visible.
Am I the only one who is super excited about this idea???? It brings the disparate ideas of UV together for me.
When I think about "alternate memories", for H2M or my own life, I find that what I brainstorm and speculate about spells out very clearly my fears and hopes and regrets and wishes. The moments I immediately think about are the times when my life could have gone one way or another – turning points, which maybe at the time didn't seem momentous, but do in retrospect.
Here are some examples from H2M and my life -- they aren't really sense memories, but I think we could easily do writing exercises to come up with sense memories from our alternate lives.
→ Jonathan founded Hand2Mouth Theatre in Poland in 1999, after spending a year interning with famed troupe Biuro Podrozy. Their first piece, created by Walters and Polish actors Ida Z, Magda D, and Patryk C, was an outdoor/visual spectacle mixing the life of American slave/revolutionary Nat Turner with the surreal writings of Polish poet Bruno Schulz.
→ In 2006, H2M created Catacombs which was an underground hit amongst the so called “creative class”. Hand2Mouth was hired by Wieden Kennedy to create a similar installation, and after portions of this performance were featured in a Nike ad, Hand2Mouth partnered with Nike and W K to create Rooftops, a performance/ installation that took place on Portland rooftops.
→ The company broke up after creating Everyone Who Looks Like You, a performance using material from their own families and personal lives that was by all accounts a catastrophic failure. After a showing in May 2009 in the Goldsmith Building in which Carol Wells called the show “a harmonic convergence of the bad,” Jonathan and Faith moved to New York, Julie moved to Chicago to attend graduate school, Liz created a solo performance about her relationship with her brother called My Heart is like a Closed Terrarium, Jerry started a performance festival called Life is a Party, and Erin disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness.
Some events in my alternate life:
→ I started playing guitar in 5th grade (and never took up the trumpet), and my senior year of high school I joined jazz band as a bass player.
→ I stayed in Lansing after graduating from college, and got a job working at Barnes & Noble while acting in plays at Riverwalk Theater and playing bass with Lansing jazz/funk band Steppin In It.
→ After I started dating Jonathan in 2001, I stopped working with Hand2Mouth, and became active in poetry circles instead. In 2008 I published a book of poems based on the German fairy tale Undine.
7 comments:
What about the alternate version of Uncanny Valley where we made a show about the Donner Party stuck in outer space guest starring Matt Le Blanc and Twiggy?
Okay, so I really like this idea as well (the physics part of my brain is jumping up and down right now and peeing a little). I have been thinking/dreaming a lot about doubling and how we can better crack the nut of creating "mirrors" of ourselves onstage that are consistent with the physics of the stage world we create. (See my upcoming blog post where I brainstorm ideas of how to break through our preconceptions of what is possible on stage).
I think, Faith, you may have struck on a unified theory of the Uncanny Valley, a different paradigm for moving forward. I know I am reluctant to give up the science fiction thread of the show, but am dissatisfied with is falling down only into pop-sci-fi. I have been reading a lot of Ursula lately and she writes her planets like parallel realities: doubles of Terra that have taken a strangely different path.
Okay, this is enough for a post comment as they never get read. I'm going to work on a blog post now.
I totally just read your comment, Marc!
Umm...me too!
Yay for comments!
You know, the best sci fi that i've read or seen -- Ursula's The Left Hand of Darkness, or The Disposessed which I'm reading right now, or the Mars Trilogy -- take their cues from science the real world which, when you look at it, is incredibly strange.
I guess, listening to this physicist yesterday, I remembered again that -- OH YEAH -- there is some trippy shit going down in physics! And it's not even on the fringes of what physicists are studying! Think about how our understanding of the world has changed in the last 500 years, and think about how much more it will change in the next 500.
And what I love about the "parallel reality" idea is that it is an actual scientific possibility, but it is also an idea that has so many psychological and metaphorical possibilities.
If we treat the idea of a parallel universe as a fact -- as tangible -- it opens up all kinds of crazy ideas, not just for this show, but for me thinking about my own LIFE.
Ok, that's enough, I fear I'm starting to sound stoned.
No way. I'm reading The Disposessed right now as well. I just finished reading The Telling, which I loved, and made me think a lot about the purpose of memory and the importance of what we do and don't choose to remember.
ooh, I'll have to check The Telling out, haven't read that one.
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