About
I like to read about physics. By “read,” I mean listen to audiobooks or use my iPad to have an AI Gwyneth Paltrow voice read PDFs. It makes me feel like I’m living in The Royal Tenenbaums.
When I don't have that, I watch YouTube. PBS has Spacetime. I also watch a German woman named Sabine. She is mean and funny and pessimistic. Very German. Like a modern-day Nietzsche.
One time, she quoted Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A band I like is named after a flower. They’re both called Orchid. Orchid has a song called “I Am Nietzsche.” I want to make graphic design that looks the way that song sounds.
They have an album called Chaos Is Me. I would call mine Order Is Me, but that sounds boring. Orchid is very fast, and they yell a lot.
After Orchid and the German woman, I go to bed listening to physics audiobooks. They use fancy words like entropy, disorder, and uncertainty. The words make my brain tingle.
Fancy French people would call that post-structuralist thought. I don't really know. I only read a five-page introduction. But I'm learning at this fancy school.
I look up words in the dictionary, then look up other words to understand those words. Something about a chain of signifiers.
There are signs.
That is what I made.
Signs.
Freestanding poster structures.
One fancy word from the physics audiobook was “the arrow of time.” It’s just a pretentious way to say clockwise. That was a joke.
The arrow of time says time only moves forward. Once an egg breaks, you can’t unbreak it.
Then La Dispute put out an album where they yell that water only flows in one direction. It only goes forward.
I’m connecting a post-hardcore band with fancy physicists. I said, “Let’s see what happens when I put my nerd things together.”
That’s what this is.
The physicists and the loud bands both talk about chaos. I like that word because it feels like the opposite of order, which I do really well.
I’m reading about chaos theory on Wikipedia. Math dorks say if you push two balls slightly differently, they end up in very different spots. A butterfly in Brazil causes a tornado in Texas. Kind of funny.
Maybe I could make chaos out of order. I like rules. What if I keep adding more rules?
I took pictures. Found ones that looked good together. Wrote code to make them look abstract. Like particles — photons. Physicists always make diagrams of spheres.
It would be funny if that arrow of time ran back into itself like Snake on old Nokia phones.
When the arrow of time acts like Snake, maybe it crashes into itself. Like Doctor Who, where time and space get mixed up.
If we keep adding steps, this becomes what science people call rich in information rather than deficient in order. That's what the bands sound like. Noise with a pattern somewhere.
I placed the signs around campus in places I like. Secret passageways. Not really secret, but I walk those ways when I don't want to see other kids.
That’s when I can listen to audiobooks, or AI Gwyneth, or watch the mean German lady, or my favorite — the loud, angry bands with their guitars and their yelling.
Dimensions
3' × 7'
Media
graphic design, photography, processing, wheate paste, oriented strand board, spray paint