How to measure performance? About the apparatus that did not want to be a tool

Abstract

The author asks about the neutrality of research procedures. She argues that artistic performance, even without explicitly seeking such a goal, can depict the workings of scientific performance. She looks at the arrangement of an artistic-research performance and interprets two activities carried out as part of the experiment_e.1/2015–2017 project of the Art and Research Foundation om — Organisms and Machines in Culture, showing that artistic performance can prove one of the theorems of theoretical physics (the so-called measurement problem), according to which it is impossible to separate the measured object from the person doing the measuring. The question about measurement is also a question about the nature of knowledge: its performative (self)production with the participation of people, devices, discourses and matter.