In Search of Radical Simultaneity: A Miniature Reading for the Theater
Abstract:
This play takes the artist group DIS’s film Everything but the World as the starting point for an investigation into the conditions and possibilities of simultaneity, celebrated within current discourse as a source of knowledge and as a mode of existence with the potential to save us from our current crises. As a work of artistic research itself, the play attempts to create different modes of simultaneity and make them tangible, in order to demonstrate the insolubility of this task: simultaneity cannot be produced, considered, perceived, or received by artistic means, since any attempt at doing so inevitably ends up producing a linear arrangement in which one thing follows the other. It is ultimately demonstrated that a radical form of simultaneity – namely, a quantum-mechanical one – could offer a way out of this dilemma, if the point is to conceive of and possibly represent simultaneity. In the end, however, the question remains open of whether simultaneity is really worth striving for. For while it offers the prospect of a better digital future, history, future, variability, and human agency are all lost in it.

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