The Zone of Pure Doubt
The Zone of Pure Doubt, created in collaboration with Judd Morrissey, is an ongoing mixed reality performance project (2022–present) that includes poetry, augmented reality, 3D lidar scanning, and original music. It is the performance component of a larger project that includes a site-specific installation, to paradise / all your names in one, and the public release of a double-single under the artists pop-art moniker, Nobo’s Muse.
Episode 4: Adrift in Latent Space reflects on the complex evolution of Morrissey and Avnisan’s decade-long collaboration and friendship, emerging from two trips taken together to the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, as well as from Morrissey’s sabbatical research into rest, navigation, and the temporal logics of the sabbath. The project takes its name from a disputed region of the Pacific where the correct timing of the Jewish sabbath cannot be agreed upon using any of the traditional rules of global timekeeping—an uncertainty amplified by the slippage between halakhic and international datelines. (You can read Judd’s sabbatical reflection here.)
The Zone of Pure Doubt navigates memory, obsolescence, aging, and gender transformation through speculative rituals of navigation, with volcanic landscapes, birdsong, and shifting horizons becoming recurring points of reference. The performance inhabits the slippage between life and art: what is lived, experienced and survived becomes the basis for self-mythologization as a tool for self-understanding, healing and transcendence. Across overlapping temporalities of bodies and bodies of land, data, and work, Avnisan and Morrissey allow themselves to fill in for the latent and projected realities of one another, staying with drift, error, and the unsettled feeling of crossing lines that refuse to hold.
Intervening in this exchange, Doug Rosman joins the performance through live acts of navigation through AI latent space. Mapping and traversing the manifold of latent variables within large language models in real time, Rosman renders navigation itself as a visual performance.
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The Zone of Pure Doubt | Episode 4: Adrift in Latent Space was first performed as part of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Media Arts Festival, ELO25 @ 25: Love letters to the Past and the Future, on July 11, 2025 in Toronto, Canada.
The work was performed for a second time on October 24, 2025 at SAIC Galleries in Chicago as an activation of Avnisan and Morrissey’s installation to paradise / all your names, featured as part of SAIC’s 2025 Faculty Sabbatical Triennial.
Information about and documentation of an earlier iteration of this work, Liner Notes for Undressing Cover Songs, can be found here.
Peformance documentation photography (below) by Kyle S. Dunne.
