The Zone of Pure Doubt (2022 - Ongoing)
The Zone of Pure Doubt is an ongoing multimodal project combining poetry, augmented reality, and original music to reimagine equatorial line-crossing ceremonies as rituals of queer transformation. The performance has manifested as five episodes with Nobo’s Muse collaborator, Ava Aviva Avnisan, and occasionally as a solo poetry reading. The most recent episode incorporates a second collaborator, Doug Rosman, who intervenes with a real-time navigation of AI’s latent space.
The Zone of Pure Doubt references an area of the pacific where the correct timing of the Jewish sabbath cannot be agreed upon. This uncertainty springs from an ancient dispute over the location of the halakhic dateline, the boundary in Jewish law that marks where a day turns, an invisible meridian whose bearings are elusive and distinct from the international standard of global timekeeping. In this sense, it is a place where the hour of rest is endlessly elusive. The Zone is imagined as a longitudinal slice of restlessness, a place outside of standardized time, where past and future selves and histories are wrested from the wreckage of past navigational errors.
The Zone of Pure Doubt references an area of the pacific where the correct timing of the Jewish sabbath cannot be agreed upon. This uncertainty springs from an ancient dispute over the location of the halakhic dateline, the boundary in Jewish law that marks where a day turns, an invisible meridian whose bearings are elusive and distinct from the international standard of global timekeeping. In this sense, it is a place where the hour of rest is endlessly elusive. The Zone is imagined as a longitudinal slice of restlessness, a place outside of standardized time, where past and future selves and histories are wrested from the wreckage of past navigational errors.
The most recent iteration was presented as The Zone of Pure Doubt, Episode 4: Adrift in Latent Space, at SAIC Galleries for the Faculty Sabbatical Triennial
