William Oldacre Photography

Tag: chaos

Open To Chaos

Burnished Metal Stained Gold Green Brown, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

A couple days ago a pal I haven’t seen or heard from since high school friended me on facebook. High school was a looong time ago for me but never mind that part. I found that he’s now a singer songwriter with an album on itunes. I listened to the first track and man I started to chuckle because it completely reminded me of this really strong memory I have of my pal just rocking out and going crazy to Back In Black by AC/DC – its because of this memory that I still like that track. The interesting thing for me is this – when I mentioned this, his response was he dug how I was so open to craziness.

That means I’ve been like this all along – that is, open to the chaotic, random, craziness of life. Here I was, thinking this was some new realization for me. Wow. This notion that order arises from chaos that I’ve written about before is apparently more fundamental to who I am than I thought.

My interest in the fun that can come from flirting with chaotic randomness is clearly part of my core makeup. I should clarify something. I imagine if one were to act purely chaotic with completely random behavior then the likelihood of fun vs un-fun things happening would probably be half the time on average. But I feel, when I follow the chaotic nature of my life, fun things happen MORE than half the time . Is this because I’m consciously directing something here or there that increases my odds of fun? I think so. I guess then truly speaking that isn’t completely chaotic behavior on my part is it? Perhaps a better description would be consciously chaotic behavior. Still its sufficiently random that I’m comfortable calling it chaotic – at least for my purposes.

When you open yourself to the inherent chaos around you, at least on some level, then you exponentially broaden your horizon of possible outcomes. For me, opening up to chaos dramatically increases my chances of finding something interesting. On a visual level, it’s like a massive buffet of incredible sights have suddenly opened before me. I think that’s so fun – I’m smiling right now as I type this just thinking about it.

Such a simple idea that opens the floodgates of possibility. Try it, you might like it.

August 22, 2012
Islands Of Meaning

The other day I accidentally saw an interesting talk by Freeman Dyson broadcast on TVO. He wrapped up quoting James Gleick’s book – The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood – saying from this point onward, our function as finite creatures – as humans, is to create islands of meaning in the flood of information – that this applies to all forms of creative activity from science, and art to literature.

He said, somewhere around the year 2000 there was a turning point visible almost everywhere in both intellectual and practical activities at which it became cheaper to collect information than to understand it.

Personally I’ve struggled over the past 17 years with this paradigm shift in almost all my personal, creative and work activities with an ever increasing panic – to the point now where I’ve embarked on several personal projects to eject and delete information – music, images, videos, books, files – that I’m not immediately using. Simply because I can easily collect them again if I need to. More and more I use the internet as a repository, as an index and search for the items I need when I need them.

I’ve bought more and more and more rotating storage – hundreds, possibly thousands of CD’s, DVD’s and now Terrabytes of harddrives. In the name of redundancy and disaster recovery, I now own more than 20 Terrabytes (approximately 20,000 Gigabytes) of disk space scattered across my print, creative and personal life – and I don’t even work with video – okay a little.

In 1999 I began to compress all my CD music into mp3 files and collect them into a single database of easily accessible music. At that time I had maybe 30 Gigabytes of music. By 2002 I was overwhelmed by the library of music I had accumulated – music I did not have enough time to hear let alone time to decide whether I liked. On top of this, I’ve now digitized all my vinyl and taped music – but have yet to edit, compress and integrate it into my collection. It’s a giant mess.

In all respects this deluge of readily available material has changed the way I function. For my Light Signatures project I’ve collected almost 5000 source images – without even trying hard – most of them worthwhile. Never before have I captured, stored and archived work with such ease, never before have I had such ready access to a feedback loop that consequently enabled the capture of such a high percentage of worthy images.

What began unconsciously at first – creating islands of meaning as Freeman and James so eloquently put it – I now openly acknowledge as my creative raison d’etre. Creating islands of meaning is exactly what I’m searching for – finding order in chaos. This concept underlies what I do in much of my life.

There are some negatives.
Items are no longer precious.
It is now harder than ever to make compelling statements.
I feel panic – I’m overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of this undertaking and concerned my projects are never-ending.

But, there are more positives than negatives – I think.
Our standards are higher. We demand and expect greater quality.
We can draw conclusions and inferences more readily and rapidly.
Education and knowledge is more accessible.
The pace of change and discovery is increasing – some may see this as a negative.
We are more connected as a whole species – as a whole society.
We are more responsible – both individually and collectively.

However, it seems cornucopia doesn’t necessarily equal paradise.

We need coping mechanisms – methods to find and utilize the information we require – discard and ignore what we don’t. Ways to sift through the chaos and noise to create compelling and meaningful constructs. These are the tools we need to make if we are to survive this tsunami wave of our own devising.

Exciting times.

June 6, 2012
Focus

Red Blue Green With White Swirls, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

Writing a blog post every week for the past year has certainly helped focus my thoughts about what I’m making. This idea of chaos vs order is clearly fundamental to what I’m exploring. Until recently I could really only articulate my work as pattern seeking – an effort to illustrate the underlying patterns in the chaotic motions of things around me.

Now, I think pattern seeking a by-product – ultimately my interest lies in order that can be found in chaos – that what appears chaotic is actually subtly ordered. It’s my job to reveal order in this apparent chaos.

There is another idea I’m intrigued with that Stephen Wolfram discussed in a Ted talk – that simple systems can create complex patterns. I recently read a post where he discusses his book A New Kind Of Science. In the post he talks about nature sampling a brood spectrum of the computational universe and the patterns that result. This post and his demonstration of the complex patterns that can be generated by simple cellular automata made me contemplate that I too am a complex pattern in a simple system – a pattern generated by the simple rules of my DNA, that in turn arose from the simple rules or our computational universe.

This notion of complexity generated from simplicity appears on many other levels – like for example, the complexity of the human brain, generated from a relatively simple segment of our DNA code. Our brain’s complexity lies in its redundancy and the parallel repetition of simple structures within it. Or for example, how we are able to perform extraordinarily difficult feats of pattern recognition simply because of this massively parallel nature of our brains – something we are hard pressed or unable to perform with today’s computers.

I think, given the relative simplicity of the laws – the fundamental structure, elements, particles and sub-atomic particles etc – of our universe, coupled with the innate pattern recognition skills or our brains, there is massive opportunity to find unforeseen order in the apparent chaos of our world – that what appears to be chaotic at first glance, may in fact be subtly ordered on some scale(s).

I’m toying with the idea of our universe as computation system, with the manifestation of complex patterns such as ourselves, spontaneously arising out of the apparent chaos – generated from the rules of our universe.

Thus, I am a pattern seeking patterns.

May 30, 2012
Creative Arc

I’ve spent a great deal of time contemplating the arc of my creative efforts. I had it in my mind that I was expected to have a single statement or some unifying theme that would explain all my efforts to date and potentially forecast where I’m going. I’m beginning to feel disillusioned by this process. It’s a fools errand – useful to someone else, but not so much for me.

I’m finding the idea stifling. I need to be unencumbered so I can roam freely through my thoughts and ideas. Maybe, just maybe, its good or perhaps useful to see the forest for the trees – survey the land ahead and know an approximate direction. But I really feel the greatest breakthroughs and creative leaps come out of left field.

That’s not to say creative leaps happen without preparation. You have to lay the groundwork – develop skills – practice – make attempts – do things. You can’t expect breakthroughs to occur with no effort or forethought, but despite the structure of preparation it’s important to stay loose and agile.

I view my recent inward retrospective of past efforts as something that has potentially narrowed the field of my efforts – and I definitely do not want to be limited.

This causes something of a conundrum for me – how to balance between the two opposites of organization and chaos.

I find amazing and striking things arise from chaos. This is exactly what draws me to the abstract work I’ve been making – the unexpected glory that will spontaneously arise from visual chaos. This is NOT random luck but rather careful, prepared, patient, watchful, waiting, for the exact right combination of elements and then the intuitive reach and grasp of that moment. Suddenly you’ve made something incredible.

May 23, 2012
Order From Chaos

green brown yellow streaks, 2011 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

I’ve always observed the flow of things. Like predicting the flow of traffic around me while I drive – to plot my optimum path through it. I do this while driving on the 401 for example. I do the same thing when I photograph – I watch the movement of things, predict their alignment and photograph the patterns.

All my images are about alignments in the chaotic flow around me and the beautiful patterns they form.

In earlier days documenting alignments was enough for me. But in time, I recognized that just because it was my perspective didn’t make it interesting or significant for others – it needed something more.

If I could somehow distill my image to it’s core elements – it’s essence – and remove distractions, I could show it for exactly what it is. I could show it without the distraction of context – in the same way a young child beholds the wonder of the world.

This is my focus now.

I give you alignment without context – order and symmetry, manifest from chaos.
Isn’t it wondrous?

October 3, 2011