ABSTRACT
The forensic turn fosters a mistrust in ourselves to identify what is true: enabling the devolution of decision making and verification to machines, it engenders the anxiety about loss of control that is inherent to that devolution. The foregrounding by theatre-makers of the value of world-making play is a reaction against, and intervention into, anxiety about machinic determinism. Oscillation between the epic and the intimate, challenging the middle-distance living engendered by the techno-present, is essential if we are to resist the dependencies enabled by the forensic turn. The prevalence of optics as a basis for standards of truth in forensic culture continues to normalise the conversion of material objects into data and images. In the recycling bin of this forensic economy of legibility, the theatrical poetics help us to un-learn our cultural training, to intervene in the slow violence of normalised entropy.
