The Jupiter Effect

The Jupiter Effect — subtitled “a strange research” — is a forty-five-minute performance made with Ufuk Şenel in 2020 and presented online that year.

The Jupiter effect was a 1970s prophecy that the alignment of the planets would trigger earthquakes on a given day; the day came and nothing happened. We took the non-event as a form. The piece is a fake research presentation — slides, data, two lecturers in earnest — about a catastrophe that will not arrive, in which the sound slowly takes over from the argument: my voice, live and processed, moves from reading the findings to singing them, the electronics turn the slide-change click into a pulse, and by the end the lecture has become a concert about waiting for the ground to move.

It is a comic piece with a serious floor, made in a year when everyone was waiting for something.