The enemy of greatness

One slippery evening in Beijing I encountered an artist I'd previously met named Saint Clair Cemin. Earlier, as a joke, he'd told me that he made art about - something ridiculous like "snoring" or something. So I approached him and said something like, "So tell me about "snoring." And he was like, "what?" And I was like, "You said you made art about snoring." And he was like, "No no. I make art about... THE UNIVERSE." Here you have to imagine that his voice got all Carl Sagany, with added reverb, while he painted an invisible arc across the starry night sky with his outstretched hand. Nice magic, Saint Clair!

I am thinking of a project that has been lying in the back of my "to do" closet for some time, and probably will for a while longer. I am fascinated by particle physics because it is the hardest of hard sciences, and yet also represents a delicately constructed card house of theoretical interpretation of data that leads to some conclusions that are rather counter-intuitive. Yet it shares with the not-so-hard science of artmaking the aspiration to describe the mysteries of the universe.

The way that science is taught in school shares very little with the process of doing science. Doing science is a process of playfully exploring the world, of intuiting beyond the limits of knowledge and then experimenting to prove or disprove this intuitive knowledge. I see this as very similar to the process of making art. The way science is often taught (despite the very cool emphasis on lab work) is authoritarian and teaches you not to challenge your assumptions. Of course, science feels as though it needs to be on the defensive these days - to counter the ignorant and corrosive ideas of religious fundamentalists and credulous new age mumbo jumbo (the category in which I think I may be unjustly placed).

I am fascinated with science videos. If I am accused of being hypnotized by "woo," my reply is that the majority of science videos make clear efforts to make science appear like a new age religion of sorts. The dramatic and fruity dialogue, the psychedelic colors of the CG imagery, the ever cheesier sci-fi synth washes... All this combined with an authoritarian tone. Yuck!

I would like to make a video where I talk to physicists about how to visualize the subatomic world. The video would be a record of how the visualizations were arrived at. The interest is that creating an objective image of the subatomic is an impossible task - just as art is an impossible task. Our ways of seeing break down at these scales, as do our concrete theoretical interpretations. The discussion would therefore reflect subjective decisions and include unknowns and unknowables. This would therefore be as much a video about art as physics. Just as, in truth, these estranged topics are intertwined.


THIS is the kind of video I am fighting against - a great example of authoritarian modernism - the opposite of science.



OMG - this narration and delivery is ridiculous;



In the following video Richard Feynman agrees with me. 10 part documentary worth watching sometime.



Of course all this relates to the current project with sciency images, but it is something different. In the current project, as exemplified by the video below, I am actually flirting with the new-agey subtext in these images, as a way to critically engage with it. A process of deconstruction. Whereas I feel like the video I am here imagining would be a process of rebuilding.