Performance Waves

Abstract

‘Performance Waves’ by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is a series of fragments that oscillate around manifestations of the wave—time, gravitational waves, light, flows, mappings, depositions and absences—all of which are operative of the suspended state of the in-between. From ancient philosophies through to Thales and beyond, water is decreed a primordial modality of being, its formation mandating the existence of the possible. In one throw of the dice, blood trills and a lap of the sea crystallizes the occulting flow of being, and performance is shown to bring the flickering state of being to the surface. The ineluctable proliferating and unfathomable expanse of the sea substantiates the state of performance, wherein time is ruptured. In this text, different abstractions of these sea performances are suggested. Marshland, a precursor to the expanse of the sea, is the gateway to an opening of a liminal site that resides inside it. Similarly, mythographic structures codify the anterior waters of chaos as the chthonic beyond. The dark water is seen as an unknown, and all the more generative for it. Being at sea enacts this mystery at the heart of everything, the magic trick of causation, and a ceaseless flow of difference. But an unknown void is far from empty: things vibrate in a vacuum. Cartographic performance and geological time encipher the proliferating chance of the sea. Seismic waves create a future relic, mapping antediluvian landscapes and virtually exhuming the hidden. This creates a performance of electronic waves, and writes an event on the seabed. Similarly, radios channel ghosts on the airwaves, an enciphering. Aporetic paths through liminal coastland create inversions of scale and reflection that duplicates themselves—an interstitial zone that is also the site for ritual deposition, a conjuring of performance, psychic geography and portal: de profundis, under sea.