The most recent Tesla car models come equipped with 12 ultrasonic sensors, 8 surround cameras, and a forward-facing radar with a detection range of 160 meters (approximately 1.5 football fields in length). Why all of this? To eliminate uncertainty. Engineers have a long standing rivalry against uncertainty. Getting rid of as much of it is as possible is an unspoken requirement of almost any design. Carrying this viewpoint in to the world of theater, now I am the one who is uncertain. Maybe uncertainty is not so bad.
The second show we watched was Árpád Schilling’s Der Letzte Gast (The Final Guest). Around halfway through the play, leaves previously dropped on stage were blown across, right into the audience! I was excited, but it felt like a risky move. What if the actors (who were on stage) had debris blown into their eyes? Being blinded during a live performance hardly seemed beneficial. The stakes were raised higher in Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana, with actors purposefully stumbling all about a wet floor littered with dolls!?! It was an OSHA nightmare. I got anxious thinking of how high the probability is for something to go wrong.
Jumping ahead a couple days to our meeting with Simon Will from Gob Squad, I heard something that changed my view of uncertainty. “A performance is not supposed to be fixed, it is supposed to live,” or at least that is what Simon says. The way actors manipulate uncertainty in a play is what makes it so lively and in the moment. The world of 1’s and 0’s a computer recognizes is not very tolerant to uncertainty, forcing most engineers to adopt the same intolerance. Instead of allowing this intolerance to handicap the engineering approach, maybe what should be created are machines that allow us too to utilize uncertainty. The two extremes of 1’s and 0’s can never adequately define the world we live in. And besides, it is best not to deal in absolutes.
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