“Sorry, we don’t serve neutrinos here.”

A neutrino enters a bar.

This is but one of many tweets inspired by the news that neutrinos – ghostly subatomic particles – may travel faster than light. If so, science fiction could become science fact, with wonderful paradoxes such as effects preceding their causes. One example would be the punchline preceding the story (in case, like me, it took a while for you to decode the joke).[*]

Descartes replies “I think not” and he vanishes.

The soundtrack walks into the text. The sound of Riga Horn Quartet comes from a wonky ship named Misisipi. However, musicians refuse to imagine time as a river. When they don’t play music they play cards. One of them already has a shiner although it’s not clear what is it that he plays dirty, the cards or the horn.

Schrodinger’s cat walks into a bar. And doesn’t.

If the results of the experiment prove to be correct and thus effects precede their causes, punchline precedes the story, what happens to logic as such? And what happens to grammar? How are we going to define ‘before’ and ‘after’, or ‘after’ and ‘before’?

A dog called Naomi catwalks out of a picture into a museum and is taken out for a walk into a film by Antanas Gerlikas. So we don’t need ‘before’ and ‘after’ as many different actions may happen in a single moment, no?

A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

A white cube transforms into a sugar (cube), also known for its ability to memorialize astral information and yet stay white. It comfortably sits on a bar table. Sugar records reveal that an iridescent paint-fed rose those blossom function as RGB colour palette is the most popular object to start the conversation about. “The rose is MacGuffin is a red herring” speaks out an unrecognized voice with a parrot’s accent.[*]

“Sometimes sugar is just a cigar” says Fred.

“Right” says Freud.

A parrot walks into a bar. It comes from the work of Marcel Broodthaers, who famously withdrew from poetry and developed a fascination for birds – as it seen in his piece “Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit—Le Perroquet” (“Don’t say that I didn’t say it—Parrot”) from 1974. His installation consisted of two palm trees, an African gray parrot, a glass case displaying Broodthaers’ catalogue, and a recording of the artist himself, reading one of his poems: “Moi Je dis Je Moi Je dis Je…”.

A magician walks down an alley and turns into a bar.

“The standard length of a miracle is around 15 seconds” says the Swedish magician Malin Nilsson. She hosts the opening night evening of the new project by Stockholm-based artist duo Goldin+Senneby “Standard Length of a Miracle”. (…) While performing a whole set of tricks on her audience she deconstructs the notion of magic. “For me, magic means using logical thinking to find little gaps in human perception and exploit them” she reveals.[*]

An amnesiac comes into a bar. He asks, “Do I come here often?”

In 15 seconds Malin Nilsson puzzles the notion of cause and effect in the mind of her audience. Everyone waits until it pasts, applauds, and leave the theatre set to re-enter safer world of cause and effect.

“Instruction N. 12. An Astral Performative Act of Imaginary Characters vs. Real Artworks, This Time Exceptionally Presented to the Population of the Physical Plan with an Introduction by the Artist” by Chiara Fumai (with Annie Jones, Rūta Junevičiūtė, Monika Lipchitz, The Anonymous Opium Addict and a piece by Cesare Pietroiusti) is about to start.