My greatest influences, when it comes to pondering on memory and remembrance, on inner experience within layered time, are Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. When conceiving a performance, I have also often thought about the techniques of editing and formal solutions used by film directors. Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Jacques Tati and Ingmar Bergman have influenced my thoughts on how to organize, present and perform the event that is my work, my performance.
The practice of organizing my performances “cinematically” is connected to the idea of life in the postindustrial society being cinematic, which comes from Jean Baudrillard. New technological environments and paradigms of research have produced a fatal perspective. I transferred it into performance as productions of parody. It was about deconstructing the seductiveness of computational efficiency. My performances Gin Platonic (2002), Rational Man (2002), Optimization of Postmodern (2003) have satirized the postmodern neo-positivist and neoliberal scientific discourse.
Another strategy is to lay aside the deconstructive, circulative movement of multimedia performances altogether. In that case, the starting point for performances lies in the experience of groundlessness that is basic to all things bodily.
I have come to propose a kind of hypothesis on performance and performance artists. A work of performance art could be described a visible artifact, whose realizations requires the bodily. Each time, it becomes a temporary part of the artist’s way to reflect the world.
This reflection mechanism I see as sculptural event, whose space-time equals to the lifetime work of the artist. Bodily time becomes the artist’s material, the director of the artist’s activity, a resource and an object of a living event.

Of my fractal dimension

I have spoken about performance space, which I see as a functional description of the real world projected into the space of performance. In performance space, things no longer remain as they were in the real world. Although they seem same, their function is different. Rather than viewing science and art through the lens of objective causal relations, I perceive them synchronically, as a structure operating between things. Structures are meanings attached to language, either subjective orders of signifiers or exact ones, like formulaic mathematical symbolism.
This interactive structure I call a dynamic system. My own field of research has its context in research on dynamical systems. Chaos theory that I use is one of the models to formulate dynamical systems. Chaos theory brought forward a new concept of dimensions that is no longer an integer. We have a conception of zero-dimensionality (a point), one-dimensionality (a line), two-dimensionality (a plane) and three-dimensionality (the world we live in). But a fractal dimension is a quantity in between integers.

Of my chaos

Phenomena apparent in performances are also dynamical systems, only their dimensions vary. They can be presented as consecutive spaces advancing in relation to time, or side-by-side, synchronically. A performer can consciously direct and control the situation into an unpredictable direction. Coincidence has a different meaning. It means that something coincidental distortion changes the course of a performance. The difference lies in the aspect that chaos can be seen as a decision made by the artist.
The negative value-aspect assigned to the chaos in everyday language does not concern the concept of mathematical chaos. I have developed a discreet model of chaos mathematically by using delay and relay as complex systems. I have modeled its dynamics as a difference equation.
In my art, I have also utilized parametric products of these diagnostic and numeric tools in the beginning of the 1990’s, such as in my performance and exhibitions Mrs. Goodwili in Dynamical Space (1993), in my performance Space Office (1994), in my exhibition Female Mathematics (1994) and in my performance and video Only for the Money (1995). What is essential here is how mathematics has been influencing the structures of my performances. I have also applied other areas of mathematics to my works, for example with my idealization of Cantor dust in a performance in the festival Never or Now Performance Art (Bergen, Norway, 2011).


>>>>