The Given and the Made: Thinking Transversal Plasticity with Duchamp, Brecht, and Troika’s Artistic Technologies

The work of Marcel Duchamp, George Brecht, and Troika is in direct dialogue with science as a socio-cultural nexus, not in a straightforwardly collaborative way but in a manner that distils an artistic technology from a transposition of the existing social-scientific technologies. This chapter argues that Duchamp’s erotic accidentals in n+ dimensions, Brecht’s event scores (four-dimensional performative ready-mades), and Troika’s dice-based cellular automata challenge three socio-scientific dogmas that order the world.

These are: 1) space is inert and three dimensional and time is ‘added’ as the fourth dimension; 2) language is static and atemporal; and 3) evolution is temporally linear – phenomena develop from simple to complex. Duchamp, Brecht, and Troika’s artistic technologies, by contrast, articulate transversal plasticity while also revealing the underlying indeterminacy of space-time, as a phenomenon and concept.