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What Is Real?

Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, yellow, purple, cyan, muted, streaks, patterns

Oil Sheen Orange Turquoise and Pink, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

Read some interesting articles today about reality from a scientific and mathematical perspective. They were illustrating the difficulty of stating an absolute definition of reality. Part of that was to reduce the definition to it’s essence. But each time they did this they ended up with a circular definition.

All of the ideas presented fascinate me – have fascinated me since I was little. There have been and continue to be lots of frightening stories about our inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. How exactly are we to judge. At some point our definitions become circular. Arguably this is because of our fundamental inability to attain an external perspective. Its impossible to fully define something you are immersed in without an external frame of reference. Thus without an external referent we are cast adrift on a sea of our own imagining.

Our… My inability to define exactly what distinguishes real from un-real is at the core of what I make. To some extent I believe a good deal of what I observe and am consequently able to document exists simply because I observe it. Hence my statement – Quantum Observer. By placing myself just so, I am able to observe and thus collapse the wave function so that all probable outcomes become an actual outcome. That is not to say that I make it happen. I don’t think so. But these things happen around me simply because I am present for them.

Perhaps once they happen for me they can happen for others, or perhaps they have already happened for others and I am only the second, third, fourth, … Nth observer. Or more likely they happen only once and I am fortunate to be present when they do. Who knows.