Lately, I’ve been thinking about uncertainty its many variants and causes - indecision, vagueness, ambiguity, fuzziness, aporia, doubt, bewilderment, terror, indeterminability, incoherence, obfuscation, chaos, deep fakery, etcetera…
Uncertainty is fundamental to creative practices and a foundational principle of quantum sciences - Heisenberg’s proposition that it is impossible to know - that is to measure - with precision both the spatial position and the energetic momentum of a particle at a given time interval. That’s presuming time can be meaningfully discretised…
All forms of measurement are, in some way however minute, uncertain - which is often quantified in the user manuals or specifications of professional metrological devices such as scales, oscilloscopes, force gages, rulers, thermometers and suchlike.
Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted that the most we can ever justifiably claim about anything is that ‘I think I know’ - rather than the emphatic ‘I know’.
The ‘surprisal’ is a unit of measure of uncertainty used in information sciences to quantify How surprised one would be by a single unusual symbol appearing in a stream of otherwise predictable or expected symbols.
Uncertainty is at the heart of the popularity of murder mysteries and the compulsion to gamble and is carefully designed into gameplay, gaming engines and narrative plotting. Uncertainty is the carbohydrate of skepticism and is mathematically contorted in the gymnasium of statistics to formulate risk potentials that inform the cost of insurance for just about anything imaginable. Risk being the inherent state of uncertainty about the potential continuity or radical transformation of agreed value.
William Butler Yeats told us ‘the center cannot hold; things fall apart’ - Keats proposed poetic creativity as ‘negative capability’, a willingness to sit with uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. Shakespeare ventriloquised the grieving Prince of Denmark to utter the epistemic bedrock expression of uncertainty ‘To be or not to be, that is the question?’
Our everyday conversations are subconsciously peppered with placeholder and filler words that signal contextual or continuity uncertainties - like, like, you know, I mean, right? umpteen, widget, thingamijig, umm, err, whats-her-name, jane doe… In the at once famous and infamous United States of America court case Roe V Wade, Roe, for Jane Roe a variation on Jane Doe used to denote a second party in a legal action, refers to the then unidentified plaintiff. Anonymity as an agentic form of uncertainty.
And I’m not sure how many other avenues of uncertainty there might be to wander. To infinity and beyond presumably… To paraphrase physicist Neils Bohr - we live and breath paradox and contradiction but are as oblivious to their beauty as a fish is to the beauty of water…
So, to this episode - it’s a blurry peripatetic exploration of vocal expressions of uncertainty, an incomplete catalogue of utterances pegged against a restless drift of chance encounters between manipulated recordings of tiny fragments of aluminium dropped onto a marble tabletop, a tall stack of metal stools I slowly dragged around an empty room and quasi-random signals emanating from of a couple of small synthesiser oscillators.
