Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Pointillism: A Perspective on Complexity

An 8.5x11 piece of white paper and 2/3 of a page of typing. Nothing more that that. It exists, and I have a need for it to not. The obvious choice is to make it disappear. I have a device comprised of a cartridge and a head. On the head, there is a lever that is the first step of operating the mechanism. I press the lever, and a mechanism opens a valve and lets the butane out. At the end of the lever press, a rotating cylinder of striker material lights a spark, and the butane is ignited. The butane burns in combination with oxygen to create light and heat, and leaves behind carbon dioxide. Eventually, the combustion of the material is at equilibrium with the amount of butane flowing from the valve and so maintains a constant flame approximately .75 of an inch long.
This constant flame is placed in proximity to the 8.5x11 piece of white paper, and the combustion of the butane causes the paper to ignite as well, but because there is more fuel, the flames grow bigger and consume increasing amount of the 8.5x11 piece of white paper. At some point, all 8.5 inches across by 11 inches tall of that paper are in flames, and I can no longer hold on to it, at which point I let it fall to the ground. However, it does not fall as a normal object would, because it is on fire, and this combustion produces a cushion of hot air under the page, which rises and slows the page down.
As the page hits the ground, the flames are beginning to run out of fuel to combust with, and begin to decrease in size. As the 8.5x11 piece of white paper is combusted entirely, the flames are gone and replaced instead by embers of the piece of white paper. These embers burn the remainder of the paper that the fire didn't consume, and then begin to die out just as the fire had. Eventually, the embers have gone out so completely, that there are hundreds of tiny dots of embers still burning on the 8.5x11 piece of white paper. One by one, these tiny dots go out, and somewhere around the time when there were less than 10 dots, I began to count them out. Ten left. Nine left. EigSeven left. Six left. FiFour left. Three left. Two left. and then one of the two shrunk from the middle of the ember, and became two. Three left. Two left. And then there was one. This one, tiny little speck of ember burned for nearly 20 seconds all by itself, surrounded by cold air, wind, and no more fuel to burn. Then it went out, and the 8.5x11 piece of white paper was gone, turned into ash, and it had disappeared.
At 10:54 on December the 15th, 2010, I burned a piece of paper with my account number on it. It caught fire, it burned, and then it went out.
It was also one of the most beautiful and entrancing things I have ever seen in my life.

There is an art form that this is known as, the reducing things to their finite mechanisms and describing them in incredible detail. I learned that in art school, and we studied Georgie O'Keefe and a man who did nothing but draw the insides of machines (his favorites were watches) and we would look at these and appreciate the complexity with which these artists saw the world, and I never understood how you could be fascinated by something so mundane. I burned a piece of paper today and acknowledged every process contributing to the burning of that page, and how simple they all were, but the process as a whole was incredibly complex, and I didn't even think about half the things I could have. When I looked that closely at something so small and found something so big, it just made it more important. What if we treated everything that importantly. If we paid a little more attention to what we are really doing in any of our daily actions - do you think they would become more important? Do you think they would become more meaningful? Do you think that we would be more respectful to wildlife if we considered the processes we were messing with? These are incredibly complex pieces of biological beauty, and we are so quick to destroy them.
Well, Ms. O'Keefe and Mr. Watch-Guy, I think I understand where you are coming from on this one.

Think about it.

Vlog3 and other stuff

Yeah, there is not a lot of other stuff. This vacation is awesome, and I can't wait to go home and see everyone.
That's about it...
Here's the vlog link
Vlog3: FINALLY!