Descartes Wax 1

The first set of Experiments i did in about 2003, just when i was finishing my PhD and working on problems of turbulence. I started a series of conversations with Philip Ording, a math student from columbia about calculus. I was interested in two things, the internal geometry of things -- meaning, how matter has specific geometrical tendencies -- as well as different ways of generating new geometries and new behaviors. I had at that time been reading a lot about calculus and the relation between mathematics and events. There was an important parallel with what I saw in connection with Stoic philosophy and the ontology of events. I was giving a lecture at Penn on Crunk Geometry -- goemetry that somehow fucks up, isn't smooth. It actually happend because i had a dent in the hood of my car that was really smooth and i tried to fix it, but it popped back with this think like a Crunk. so the first experimetn was to repeat that with paper and then a piece of wax, to make a crunk, and then smooth it out with a kind of calculus like incision (the stoics had an interesting notion about the ontology of things and that was that events are more "real" than things -- see emile Brehier on the cut). But i became fascinated by the reorganization and the folds. I also had a intern at the office and we began to play with ways of making turbulence. the wax pieces that followed were from problems of convection, assymetry, and the Rayleigh number -- a dimensionless number (unlike gravity) at which matter begins to reorganize itslf geometrically.