God is Meditating: Still (2022)

‘God is Meditating: Still’ examines our desire to predict the future in times of uncertainty, in relation to all that manifested in the history of science, meteorological technology and deterministic computations.

Read:
-Dorothy Hunter responds to “God is Meditating: Still”
-Review on Irish News

Today, we are so used to our smart technology to accurately forecast 14 days of weather in advance. Only just more than a century ago, weather prediction was perceived as a mystical prophecy which would be an act against God. Admiral Robert Fitzroy, the Meteorological Statist (later head of MET office) came up with plentiful inventions to detect atmospheric changes which advanced immensely weather forecasting and gave form to data analytics. His inventions include the Storm Glass [1], referenced in the work ‘Climate Change in a Tea Cup’.

In 1814, Laplace postulated a super-intelligence that could know the positions, velocities, and forces of all the particles in the universe at one time, and for all times.[2] Artificial neural network is a very close example of this super-intelligence within our society today.

Our current digital technology is based entirely on binary signals. Machine learning today is continuing to master its predictive analytics on any type of complex system, for example, meteorology, sports, gambling, and politics. What is the implication of Laplace’s belief in causal determinism as predictions become accurate? What does it mean for humanity as we increasingly depend on these deterministic machines?

Science is reductionist; the nature of science can push abstractionism to its limit and also provokes the increasing possibility of deterministic beliefs. Our society is motivated by an obsession to make the uncertain certain; to untangle and map causalities. While I was writing this, I was interested in what quantum indeterminacy might offer in terms of an alternative solution to the merely on/off-ness of digital signals. This symbol of discreteness, polarity, and binary state is captured in the work ‘Bit’, which depicts the sequential circuit that is used to create the past and the future of a unit of information.

Imagine a scenario where we can predict the future and another scenario where we can influence this predicted future; these are two states that can co-exist in terms of what we understand as quantum superposition.

Yet Gerard t’Hooft argues that once we prove beable exists [3], then quantum superposition will just collapse into classical distinguishable states. That means Schrödinger’s cat will definitely emerge either dead or alive, and never in a superposition. Still in this exhibition, I have referenced the observer’s effect in the work ‘The Super-intelligent Angle’, hoping that it is just the abstractionism in theoretical physics being at play.

Anyhow, a quantum computer demonstrates the vast capacity of the information it can calculate and store. It provides a glimpse into the idea that if the universe is as extensive as the quantum computer—if not more; the almost infinite amount of probabilities of cause-and-effect that a change in our decision impacts can exist at the same time in different multiverses. Like in the work ‘Parallel Rainverses’, I always have this feeling that after I relocate to a different place, part of me still goes on living in the cities that I’ve left. Our free will is just one of the universes that we picked and drifted into for the moment of time, until the next decision is to be made.

When making works for this exhibition, I was reminded to play with open interpretations. Inspired by Cornelius Cardew’s graphic scores and the Fluxus sound poems, ‘Negotiating Laplace’s Demon’ aims to explore similar ideas with open rules for performers. Renewed with the language that links humans with machines, the ‘instructions’ and ‘notations’ are written to fall in the spectrum between open and close, improvisation and control, randomness and sequence. The scores also narrate the points of interest in information history—how digital language has evolved, and key discoveries that support or challenge determinism.

Footnote

[1] The inventor is unknown but the device became popular in the 1860s after being promoted by Admiral Robert FitzRoy.

[2] Pierre-Simon Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 1814.

[3] Gerard t’Hooft coined the term ‘beable’ in The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

Image by Simon Mills.

Work Title: The Super-Intelligent Angle

Year of Production: 2022

Size of Work: Dimension varies

Material/Medium: Sextant, wood, string, light-emitting diode, text on white vinyl

Acknowledgement:

Carpentry: Michael Edgar

Project Funding: Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Image by Simon Mills.

The fundamental building block of memory is a bistable element, an element with two stable states. This diagram shows a simple bistable element consisting of a pair of inverters connected in a loop. The inverters are cross-coupled, meaning that the input of I1 is the output of I2 and vice versa. The circuit has no inputs, but it does have two outputs, Q and Q’. Q depends on Q’ and Q’ depends on Q.
Both Q = 0 and Q = 1 are stable (hence bistable), and the subtle point is that the circuit has a third possible state, a metastable state, with both outputs approximately halfway between 0 and 1. This allows 1 bit memory to be stored when power is applied.

Work Title: Bit

Year of Production: 2022

Size of Work: Dimension varies

Material/Medium: Pencil on paper showing fundamental building block of computer memory

Project Funding: Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Image by Simon Mills.

Work Title: Present Perfect Continuous

Year of Production: 2020-2021

Size of Work: 20cm x 29cm

Material/Medium: Ink in collaboration with raindrops on paper

Image by Simon Mills.

With the sun dominating the way human civilisation has divided time, I am interested in looking at cycles driven by rain patterns, and the idea of forming ‘rain years’, placing my sense of self, and memory over different multiverses of the rain.

This installation comprises several music boxes, fed in DIY Jacquard card style paper tapes. The holes being punched on the Jacquard cards are the recorded rain data, which are then turned into music.

Work Title: Parallel Rainverses

Year of Production: 2022

Size of Work: 90cm (w), 70cm (h), maximum 3m (l)

Material/Medium: Sonic sculpture: hand-crank Jacquard mechanisms, ink on paper

Acknowledgement:

Historical rainfall data: Duncan Ball, Information Specialist at MET Office; S L Lau, Climatological Services Section Hong Kong Observatory

Carpentry: Michael Edgar

Project Funding: Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Image by Simon Mills.

Image by Julia Gillard.

Work Title: Negotiating Laplace’s Demon

Year of Production: 2022

Size of Work: Dimension varies

Material/Medium: Prints on music stands, dice, clave, interactive acousmatic

Project Funding: Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Image by Simon Mills.

Work Title: Climate Change in a Tea Cup

Year of Production: 2022

Size of Work: Dimension varies

Material/Medium: ethanol, water, camphor, potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, glass, print on paper

Project Funding: Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

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