The more I think about the work I make, the more I realize scale is a factor. Not in the size but rather in the relationship between the moment and the stream of time. The images I make all have a long duration, to capture movement that a glimpse can’t properly reveal. I’m compressing long periods into a single frame to include the dynamics of the world, because this is how we experience it ourselves – not as increments of stillness but as a continuous flow.
I’ve been reading some unusual sci fi books by Rudy Rucker in which he makes some interesting points. Rudy is a mathematician and his books are full of some of the weirdest stuff you can imagine but a great deal of it is grounded in fantastic mathematics. I have no idea where reality leaves off and fantasy begins having nowhere near enough knowledge of the mathematics he describes. Perhaps it’s all real which would be even stranger.
In one of the Ware Tetralogy stories one of the characters makes an interesting observation I firmly believe… “Art is the highest form of communication. In art one has the opportunity to encode the entire soul.” I suppose if taken to it’s logical extension then the highest art form would be to entirely encode oneself again (… and again?… and…) an exact duplicate. Are we entering the domain of creationism at this point? This is where everything gets really twisted up – well that is if you don’t already feel twisted up at this point.
To me this sort of theoretical mathematics falls into the same domain as theoretical quantum physics – the realm of dreams. If we have a strong enough imagination perhaps we can dream it into real. Whichever, these type of ideas scratch at the very roots of our world view.
There was another excellent observation which I can’t seem to locate right now. Essentially it went something like… after all needs are met, the ultimate function of any being is to become fully aware. Also something I firmly believe and something I enjoy pondering – as in what would the world look like if – and what would we all do if – all our needs were met. The implication here too is – and we don’t die.
Food for thought.
Just imagine.
I try to imagine how the world will all unfold as time moves on but after a certain number of folds it becomes foggy and indistinguishable from my dreams. I hope the world will spin a certain way but it never does. I’m not sure if its better to constantly dream about what might be or be slapped in the face by what is.
When I was younger, there were lots of things to worry about like the cold war, apartheid, the Berlin wall, nuclear proliferation and lots of doom and gloom about how the future was shaping up. But in retrospect a lot of completely unforeseen things happened, a lot of predicted things never happened and the world is not the place most of us imagined it would become. Our lives are not the ones many of us predicted we’d have.
When I look at my father and my grandmother, part of me thinks my life will run a similar course, but then I listen to the stories from both their childhoods and realize their lives never unfolded the way they thought they would either so why would mine.
Part of us looks out at the world the way it is now and imagines it was always this way and will continue to remain this way. I didn’t realize how untrue this was until I returned to London where I attended university after 10 years away or until I returned to the street in Guelph where I grew up after a similar amount of time – everything had changed – everything that was important in my memory was different.
I wonder how we all manage to function when everything we do is built on shifting sands and uncertainty – but somehow we do and eventually it all works out in the end – doesn’t it.
I’ve been trying to get to the heart of why chaos and order are so fundamental to my efforts. I could cite the patterning by music I was so thoroughly exposed to in my formative years as a source. But also equally important were my summers spent north in the woods camping experiencing the natural world. And then there is my innate desire to build that manifested at an early age – people thought I would become an engineer. Somewhere – held in balance in this triangle of forces – is my desire to find order in chaos.
Order from chaos is a slippery concept. One could argue that chaos is a relative state dependent on the sample size of the system in question. Order can be found in any chaotic system if you take a large enough perspective… this is my intuitive feeling at least. But if you look closely the overall patterns disappear and all you see is random behavior. In an active system such as a city, it’s at the boundary layer – between the large and the small sample – that interesting things happen. Where the abrupt manifestation of pattern in the noise will give a tantalizing glimpse of the larger order.
I find this fascinating – and strangely – hopeful.