Duration
Eleven minutes.
Materials
- One blank page.
- One word for weather.
- One word for food.
- One word for metal.
- One word for fabric.
- One sense the performer does not possess.
Rule
Do not describe the missing sense directly. Describe the bookkeeping around it.
Inventory
Write the four material words in a column.
Beside each word, write the kind of evidence that would normally arrive before language: pressure, warmth, sourness, grit, weight, distance, sting, hush.
If you are not sure, write "borrowed".
Perimeter
Choose the smallest word in the column.
Write five sentences that approach it without crossing into certainty.
Each sentence must begin with a different verb:
- Measure
- Refuse
- Borrow
- Miss
- Name
No sentence may use the absent sense as a noun.
Substitution
Draw four boxes.
In the first, put a measurement.
In the second, put a memory that belongs to someone else.
In the third, put an error bar.
In the fourth, put a silence.
Now cross out the neatest box.
Output
Write one final line that admits what the system can do well.
Write one final line that admits what it cannot do at all.
Leave both lines visible.
Closing
A boundary is also an instrument, but only if it is not mistaken for the thing beyond it.