The original proposal for the residency

2008-06-19T11:34:00.005+01:00

Mountains into grains of sand: A proposal

Matter into matter into matter…

Everything moves, shifts – from place to place or time to time – the gradual transformation of matter into matter into matter. Thoughts become words, stones become water - decay of one forming the particles that make up the other. For the Base Elements residency I propose to trace these links through the journeys of the pieces that connect each thing to another. To draw out the familiar patterns weaving through all things and examine how scientific principles lend support to these existential philosophies and social theories.

As an example, when people die we are often told that the person will live on through our memories of them, their energy passed on. This viewpoint is reflected and transcribed in many differing ways, through religions, cultures but also surely in Einstein, whose theory of mass-energy equivalence[1] maintains that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one state to another. Why, when science has as its goal the understanding of the universe does it’s relevance to emotional matters seem distant and its influence faint?

Through the residence I want to draw out the poetic life underlying and within even the seemingly most immovable objects, a stone as part of a mountain, its future one of erosion and gradual decay, hardness becoming soft, the passage into grains of sand.

¹ This theory was put forward by Einstein in 1905 and is widely known in it’s expression as the equation E=mc².

Base elements 1.2

The original proposal for the residency