by Irma Optimist Mathematician and performance artist Helsinki, Finland.
   
There is no easy way to comprehend the complex concept of performance.
A performance is an attractor. It can be viewed as a space that has its moment, location and direction. There is something foreseen and occasional about it. Performance?s logic is non-linear. No part of it is completely controlled. The positions in the tripolar situations between the performer, the audience and the photographer are also variable. The relationship
is dynamical: everyone participate in the event of performance, only the intensity of participation varies. The performer can take part in the performance actively or passively, and the same applies to the audience and  the photographer alike. Together all this constitutes the attractor of performance. The density of  this attractor can be random or determined, depending on conditions of the tripolarity of the performer, the audience and the photographer. The result of the performance and the document is depends on who determines these conditions and how. And this applies not only to the actual performance but also to the interpretations of the performance and the document indifferent contexts.
What is the ontological essence of the performance? Can the photograph be understood separately apart from the corporeality of the performance?
Can the performance be separated from the bodily presence of the performer?

Performance as an attractor
Each individual performance can be seen as an attractor basin, which is a space for interpretations detached from concrete space, in which a performance is usually represented by a document. The narrative concerning the physical dimension of the performance presented by the document is problematic. The photographer produces the document as a part of a discourse. So who to be heard when interpreting the documents? The performer? The photographer? The audience? Can the question of the performance and the document, the performance and the photograph, even be made?
Can it be meaningful to speak of photographs as performance documents, or even certain photographs as performances? What remains is the narratives and their readings. There can be no use discussing the photographing of performances in general sense, as the positions of artists, documents and narratives are not general but particular. Not everything depends on narratives. The totality of  performance and document behaves according to the same principles as the attractive behaviour of all dynamical systems in its most typical form, i.e. as a point attractor: the result of all the states of the system moves towards one fixed point, which can be either stable or unstable.
The more the performance is stripped down from the triad of the performer, the audience and the photographer, the more stable it becomes. When the interaction is simplified and the disruptive elements are ignored, for example in the performances made for camera without audience, pre-seen stability can be reached. But even this stability cannot stay immune to
later discussion. When the performance produces the geometry of an unstable point, which means special unpredictability in the tripolity and after-effect of the performance, we arrive at a strange attractor, chaos of  performance. This strange attractor can be perceived as a special
feature in both performance and photography.

Translated from Finnish by Lauri Luhta