Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

 

Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

 

In 2006, a performative apparatus was activated within a hotel room in Geneva—an environment operating simultaneously as a spatial container and a neutralized architecture of regulation. The performance constructed a field of epistemic operations based on the formal structure of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (1931), which remain fundamental to mathematical logic and the philosophy of formal systems.

 

Two compost containers functioned as epistemological devices. Each was assigned one of Gödel’s theorems, not to symbolize them, but to act as operational surfaces through which non-decidability and internal inconsistency could be performed materially. Rather than creating narrative or symbolic readings, the setup deployed the composts as experimental variables—unstable matter undergoing entropic processes of decomposition and transformation.

 

 

 

From the curatorial perspective of performance studies—as developed by RoseLee Goldberg and later rearticulated in André Lepecki’s analysis of movement, immobility, and time—the piece displaced the body as the primary site of performance and instead foregrounded abstract systems, feedback loops, and logical structures as the protagonists of the performative event.

 

 

 

The First Incompleteness Theorem, applied to one container, asserts that any consistent formal system capable of expressing arithmetic will contain true statements that are unprovable within the system. The compost associated with this theorem functioned as a generative system outside of full codification: a dynamic substrate whose processes could be observed, perturbed, but never entirely mapped or resolved.

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The Second Incompleteness Theorem, linked to the second container, states that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. This recursive impossibility was spatialized in the performance through a set of actions that denied the possibility of internal closure: the use of a laser (a high-frequency, deterministic tool) applied to an unpredictable surface; the attempt to communicate with a non-human medium via a walkie-talkie in an invented, non-indexical language; and the eventual covering of the entire operation with a sterile green surgical drape, interrupting visibility and suspending verification.

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This final gesture—the occlusion—directly responds to what Adrian Heathfield has termed “the aesthetics of disappearance” in performance: the refusal of full visibility, the staging of ungraspable phenomena, and the challenge to archival logic. However, rather than romanticizing ephemerality, the work maintained a rational structure: each action was part of a logical sequence of procedural constraints. The invented language was not expressive but formal, a system without reference but complete in its syntax—testing the boundaries of communication theory and transmission logic.

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Catherine Wood’s writings on performance in institutional contexts resonate here: by activating performance as a system rather than spectacle, and by replacing the performer’s body with materials governed by formal limits, the work interrogated not only the boundaries of the artwork but also the systems through which knowledge is generated, represented, and contained.

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The presence of technological elements—walkie-talkie, laser, surgical drape—was not incidental. These were selected and deployed as devices of precision, transmission, and sterilization. They acted as tools of systematization inserted into an environment that refused stabilization. Chantal Pontbriand’s framing of performance as “research in real time” becomes particularly relevant here: the performance did not seek to represent undecidability—it tested it under tightly controlled yet unresolvable conditions.

Rather than proposing allegory or metaphor, the performance operated as a material experiment with formal limits. It proposed a non-human-centric, system-based structure that echoed the foundational limits of rational knowledge as defined by mathematical logic. The choice of Geneva—epicenter of international standardization, diplomacy, and techno-scientific governance—further reinforced the work’s relationship to epistemic control and its necessary breakdowns.

In this sense, the performance may be read not as an artwork but as a temporary epistemological lab: a controlled failure of system closure.

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