DirtyGeometryStructure

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.

Portrait of the office as an artist

The series of videos explores the relation between the random and the specific through an algorithm that takes the original footage of discussion and recombines the statements - ad infinitum. The premise is a kind of dilemma about portraiture and the conventions of portraiture. Although the discussion ranges from Rembrandt (was he doing self-portraits?) to biometric readings and identity theft, the potential for various statements to appear through the algorithm is an important part of maintaining a tension between random and specific behavior. The portrait is both "natural" insofar as it is of a unique organic subject and highly "artifical" insofar as that subject is posed. If I take a random picture of someone or a group of people, its not clear in what sense that is a portrait. But if somehow frame, as Lea put it, a negotiation (and remember, she's French, so the term is loaded) between the artist and the subject, i have a highly specific moment. The most interesting moment of this exploration occurs during the Baroque when Northern artists begin to explore the relation between the artist/viewer and the subject. Rembrandt, Franz Halls, Velazquez and others constantly experimented with ways of introducing both a random event and a highly specific moment. There were certain social and cultural as well as economic forces that contributed to this, but one of the most important among them was the rise of a professional class and the previous iconoclasm. Artists were no moving toward a more secular set of activities. Mixed with a resurgent interest in the nature of phenomena there is an incredible "Meditation" on the flux of life from Chardin's boy blowing bubbles to Vermeers interiors. Of course, it is also precisely at this moment that be begin to see a different interest in the relation between mathematics and phenomena -- the invention of calculus and the inroduction of rates of change. Mathematics now being capable of describing not just positions or objects or relations, etc., but also Events -- meaning, rates of change.
In this sense one of the curious outcomes is the relation between information, pressure, and matter. the portrait is in many ways the attempt to capture the rate of change in its infinitesimal quality, the barely perceptible. The portrait seems like a natural subject in art. I mean, it seems like something that would be inherent in art. But it really isn't like that. Roman portraits had very specific legal and political functions. And they changed dramatically from the Republican to the Imperial period.