Stephanie Catanzaro (Australia).

 

How can you see the world as real if what is determining it to be real is in itself intangible? Why do we keep creating the same realities? What forms the direction we take in our lives, and formulates our futures? Schrödinger’s Pawn outlines the importance of the human mind in creating our existence-both personal and universal.

 

The focus moves from an internal creation to a physical external alteration of reality. Schrödinger’s Pawn has become a composition involving the distortion of Time and Space as a function of human behaviour.

 

Thus the Work situates itself as a piece of speculative fiction, asking ‘what if?’, sharing similarities with classic texts such as The Time Machine.

Controlling space and time has been a large part of the science fiction genre, and in order to understand their existence the characters must first be aware of the governing laws of age and of life, how their choices can influence the course of their future, and someone else’s.

 

The idea remains that the former status of existence is impinged upon by possibility. The Schrödinger’s Cat experiment defines that until we physically experience a solution there is no certainty to the answer. This, combined with the control and crucial decision making required in Chess form the controlling points of my story.

 

The Chess language is not designed to be coherently understood by people who are not familiar with it. It is simply Arico’s view of the world through the metaphor of the chess pieces; he is the white Knight- a soldier- and Alessandra is his loyal Bishop. His mother is the opposing Queen, her personality as dark as her symbol. Lucas is represented in the Black Knight and though he does not oppose Arico, essentially, Lucas is the equal and opposite of the white Knight, while Jillian asserts herself as the white Queen- her intelligence and eventual understanding giving her the powerful position as a controller.

 

Everything that you read to do with Quantum physics has been researched and is accurate from the time of that research, the only exception being an erroneous concept in relation to time- that it took just over a minute for a decision to change the course of the future. This fictional idea became the basis of the “one minute and twenty-four seconds” theme that emphasises the idea of Time being outside of human comprehension, instead belonging to the Quantum universe.

 

The structure of the piece is unusual, however I didn’t want to limit myself to a particular style or form. Consequently the scenes in part three and four where my two protagonists meet is written in a completely different text type… script.

“The teenagers begin leaving the store… It is essentially, the same scene as ACT THREE: SCENE FOUR, only told from a different perspective.”

 

Even the script structure is unusual, inspired by Tom Stoppard’s narrative-like stage directions. The change in form breaks away from the continuous structure and thus creates dimension in the piece, reminding the audience of objectivity. Similarly, the script depicts the strict pre-determined actions of the characters, without any control over their futures, emphasising the common audience perception of fate I intend to change.  I found that a post-modernistic way of using language allowed the thoughts of the characters to be accepted as a reflection of human thought pattern, similar to the way Stream of Consciousness works.

 

Everything that composes this story, from the structure to the style is important is conveying the message of the piece- the idea that what we perceive as ‘reality’ can be manipulated by our own consciousness as we move along the dimension of Time. Similarly, the impact of our choices on this reality we create can be more significant that what we first think.

 

We’re reality producing machines. And life- it’s all just a game isn’t it?

A game that depends on our choices.

 

I hope you enjoy it.