Hearing Things and Dancing Numbers: Embodying Transformation, Topology at Tate Modern

Abstract
Theory, Culture & Society 29(4/5) 334–342 ! The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276412450468 tcs.sagepub.com
This paper reports on a weekend performance event at the Tate Modern that explored how the senses of sound and movement can be used to apprehend geo- metrical and topological shapes and mathematical concepts. The sound sculpture Knots and Donuts spatialized sound and sonified space. It attuned the ‘mind’s ear’ and the auditory imagination to conceive of a Borromean Knot and a torus within an immersive three-dimensional sound field. Through dance movement, the choreog- raphy of Ordinal 5 actualized the specific mathematical entity as understood in cat- egory theory. Both parts of the programme are considered as a performance as research experiment with an audience. Its aim was to understand how the sensory experience of the embodied mind might provide a basis of rationality in which mean- ing is not restricted to text and image, that is, an embodied topology.
Keywords
embodiment, gesture, listening, mathematics, performance, sound