Working my way through Mady Schutzman’s “Joker Runs Wild” and Heather Raikes’ “Fluid Architectures and Sampled Spaces: Reflections on a Media/Architecture Performance,” I am initially struck by how different these electronic performance installations are. Part of this is due to different coding formats that frame the experience: Schutzman’s HTML system of texts and links versus Raikes’ Shockwave multimedia synaesthetic slideshows. Part of the differential gulf is due to the explicit goals of the pieces. The goal of “Joker” is to motivate a change in transformative theatre practices by reinserting a forgotten Boalian technique into contemporary workshops. The goal of “Fluid Architectures” is to stage a transformation in the documentation of performance: this piece is a performance in its own right, but a performance of a documentation of another performance, “cosine.” “Fluid Architectures” is a fluid document, an open and moving archive.

Yet another part of my initial disorientation brought on by an expectation of similarity is due to articulations of authorship and performative enactments. “Fluid Architectures,” though attributed to Raikes, is produced by multiple authors. Its composition emerges from disparate aesthetic histories. This performing document is collectively thematized, yet singularly enacted. On the other hand, “Joker” is singularly authored from the perspective of a personal aesthetic history (although secondary authorship is attributed to the web designer). In a fashion that seems directly reverse from Raikes’ piece, Schutzman’s work is singularly thematized, though collectively enacted in a workshop-style performance. On my initial trip through these installations, I come up against a curious and unanticipated finding: what holds these pieces together is mathematics. Surely there is more to performance and technology than a common interest in math. Surely, there is. As always with installations, I need to move through them several times, at different speeds and in different orders.

As I work my way through these performance installations further, themes of motion and spatiality—spaces of movement—gain prominence in my readings. The themes linking space and movement to performance and technology are articulated in liberatory and multiplicitous terms. Both of these performances articulate space as a multiplicity. These two performance installations give a sense of how performance—in and as medium, message, and metaphor—can be creative.

Creating a space for creativity is a way that performance can orient thought and action to movement, fluidity, and change. This is an ambulatory and wandering notion of space itself. Here we have (no small) ontological shift. Privilege is given to movement over and against static points of rest (i.e., beginnings and endings). Static points are the sedimented structures of thought and action that describe most modernist orientations to knowledge, truth, and reality. A shift in orientation to movement has serious implications for theorists engaging power, politics, arts, virtuality, and the real. In the “vague spaces” evoked and invoked in these performance installations, movement and transformation are given constitutive, aesthetic, and even ethical priority. They let process have its due.