PreText BeeYond in Four-mation

1980-2006

plastic, wood & metal 36x42x33 cm (LED internally lit)

Dedicated to Linear Alphabets and Charles Seife

A transparent book (a ‘text’) made of plexiglass with four golden bees encased in the cover.

A ‘black hole’ at the centre of the book.

Pythagoreans believed the ‘Tetrad’ (the number 4) to be a perfect number, and taught that it symbolised God. In mythology bees (amongst their other symbolisms) are the organizers of the universe between earth and sky, represent all vital principles and embody the soul. In some texts from India, the bee signifies the spirit becoming intoxicated with the pollen of knowledge.

You may remember from ‘The Black-Hole Truth’  that black holes ‘swallow’ information and do not (unless they are ‘naked singularities’) let it out. (‘God abhors a naked singularity.’)

One may feel uncomfortable with Charles Seife's postulated theory that the universe is just one giant computer. What (if anything) lies beyond its calculations ? OK ! So ‘things’ in the universe can be expressed by means of the binary system! So what ? Where did the dominant conditions and rules that permit the existence of these measurable ‘things’ come from ? Surely, even if the universe (or infinite multiverse ?) is the result of sheer chance, chance must have found a fertile ground on which to work its magic. What exactly is the nature of such fertile ground? (Is it eternal ?)

One may perhaps wish to agree with Bertrand Russell that ‘the universe is just there’. So perhaps, as absurd as the opinion may appear (though it is probably in some way logical since enunciated by a mathematician) the conditions, as well as the ‘text’ embodying the primordial rules (though rather unsatisfactory rules !), have always existed and always will:

‘In the beginning there was no Beginning,

And in the end no End…’
                                             

                                                        Christopher Logue

How can a process that ‘just is’ be created? (A modern ‘extension’ of ‘Pantheism’ ?)

One may possibly be unsatisfied with such a reductive answer, and start arduously speculating on the possible existence of ‘powers and presence of an Entity’ which does not possess the characteristics, and especially the limits, of this Universe as it is.

Should we, at this point, take into consideration James Joyce's rhetorical question, ‘What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and embrace one which is illogical and incoherent ?’

No answers here just humble questions ! And a ‘pre-text’ for ‘creating’ a ‘conceptual sculpture’ !