In my performance-as-research work Two Bobs and a Steve, produced during my residency at K3, I explore resonance within the inanimate, probing the boundaries between the algorithm and human expression. The work involves two men engaged in a tightly structured, mathematically-defined score that spirals into absurdity: two men, two saws, one score, one falls—an exploration of homosociality and the inevitable collapse when the human body becomes an inherent cog in an algorithmic machine and driven by their inability to let go. This research focuses on the immanent dramaturgies that emerge within the rigid mathematical system of Steve Reich’s musical structures, searching for the human within the inanimate.
Resonance, in this context, operates at multiple levels:
- Immanent Dramaturgies: uncovering patterns embedded within the formal constraints of the score, seeking resonant human qualities that defy the mechanistic structure.
- Shaking the System: destabilizing and destratifying the rigid system, exposing new relationships and opportunities for resonance within a seemingly static framework.
- Mutual Transformation: rather than imposing a narrative, the performance translates the system into its own universe where environment and action are co-constitutive.
- Visibility through Design: creating performance situations where the goal of the research—finding resonance between the human and the inanimate—becomes perceptible.
Attempting to discover the human within the inherent mathematical scores and algorithms is an artistic exploration of how algorithms affect and resonate in the human body. As algorithms increasingly structure our reality, this work asks how rigid, algorithmic functions can connect to human experiences. The search for resonance in a mathematically governed system becomes an exploration of our contemporary entanglement with algorithmic life—where human agency, emotion, and vulnerability coexist with the algorithm’s impersonal, mechanical logic.