Abstract

This paper reports on a weekend performance event at the Tate Modern that explored how the senses of sound and movement can be used to apprehend geometrical and topological shapes and mathematical concepts. The sound sculpture Knots and Donuts spatialized sound and sonified space. It attuned the ‘mind’s ear’ and the auditory imagination to conceive of a Borromean Knot and a torus within an immersive three-dimensional sound field. Through dance movement, the choreography of Ordinal 5 actualized the specific mathematical entity as understood in category theory. Both parts of the programme are considered as a performance as research experiment with an audience. Its aim was to understand how the sensory experience of the embodied mind might provide a basis of rationality in which meaning is not restricted to text and image, that is, an embodied topology.