Descartes Wax

i

One of the primary interests of the office is the interest in matter and geometry -- the ways in which matter can be organized, or disorganized. For a number of years i've been playing with this material and looking at problems of turbulence. turbulence is an interesting problem because it can't be fully calculated -- that is, there is no forseable moment in the future when the full dynamic state of turbulence can actually be calculated. What we have are algorithms to simulate, or truncate, the behavior. But there is another reason which is that the turbulence is an effect of the geometry of matter and energy relations. It belongs to a kind of catasrophic moment and the reogranization of matter. The pieces are developed through a process of convection. We think of them as portraits of matter. This stretches the analogy a bit, but it essentially means portrait of the behavior of matter. In the 5th meditation, Descartes is toying with this problem of flux and instability. The cogito is that moment in intellectual history when a phenonmenon is fixed -- i can doubt everything but that i think. In connection with geometry, we hear a lot about the Cartesian grid and its arresting of phenomena -- that it is static, etc. We hear this a lot in architecture. Its really a kind of stupid point. Descartes didn't invent the grid per se, but rather a coordinate system. This coordinate system transformed the very nature of geometry since it could now be submitted to algebra. Without this, we know, there would be no calculus. so the Cartesian wax is in a sense this kind of obsession.