{"id":621,"date":"2022-08-05T11:29:16","date_gmt":"2022-08-05T01:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/?page_id=621"},"modified":"2024-03-17T09:40:59","modified_gmt":"2024-03-16T22:40:59","slug":"67-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/67-2\/","title":{"rendered":"67"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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release date: 02 august 2022
listen on soundcloud<\/a>

Lately, I\u2019ve been thinking about uncertainty and its variants and causes – indecision, vagueness, ambiguity, fuzziness, aporia, doubt, bewilderment, terror, indeterminability, incoherence, obfuscation, chaos, deep fakery, etcetera\u2026

Uncertainty is fundamental to creative practices and a foundational principle of quantum sciences – Heisenberg\u2019s proposition that it is impossible to know, to measure with precision, both the spatial position and the energetic momentum of a particle at a given time interval. And that\u2019s presuming time can be meaningfully discretised.

All forms of measurement are in some way, however minute, uncertain. This 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 \u2018I think I know\u2019, rather than the emphatic \u2018I know\u2019.

The \u2018surprisal\u2019 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 underpins the popularity of murder mysteries and the compulsion to gamble and is carefully designed into gameplay, gaming engines and narrative plotting. It is the carbohydrate of skepticism and is mathematically contorted in the gymnasium of statistics to formulate risk potentials that inform calculating the cost of insurance for just about anything imaginable. Risk being the inherent state of uncertainty about the continuity or radical transformation of agreed value.

WB Yeats told us \u2018the center cannot hold; things fall apart\u2019. Keats proposed poetic creativity as\u00a0 \u2018negative capability\u2019, a willingness to sit with uncertainties, mysteries or doubts \u2018without any irritable reaching after fact & reason\u2019. Shakespeare ventriloquised the grieving Prince of Denmark to utter the epistemic bedrock expression of uncertainty \u2018To be or not to be, that is the question?\u2019

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, thingamajig, umm, err, whats-her-name, Jane Doe\u2026

In the contentious US 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.

I\u2019m not sure how many other avenues of uncertainty there might be to wander. To infinity and beyond presumably\u2026 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 of the Sonic Sketchbooks podacast. It\u2019s 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 classroom, and quasi-random signals emanating from of a couple of small synthesiser oscillators.
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release date: 02 august 2022listen on soundcloud Lately, I\u2019ve been thinking about uncertainty and its variants and causes – indecision, vagueness, ambiguity, fuzziness, aporia, doubt, bewilderment, terror, indeterminability, incoherence, obfuscation, chaos, deep fakery, etcetera\u2026 Uncertainty is fundamental to creative practices and a foundational principle of quantum sciences – Heisenberg\u2019s proposition that it is impossible to… Continue reading 67<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-621","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":697,"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/621\/revisions\/697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sonicsketchbooks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}