nearer still, prandtl-glauert singularity

photo credit: realbigtaco, file:FA-18 going transonic.jpg 2008

sometimes we needn't stir the senses through metaphor to inspire a reality beyond what we readily see; sometimes the physics or chemistry of what already is sheds another veil from what we see revealing an ever truer medium.

the moment with a work of Art should touch this mark; this is my science---an gedankenexperiment into Form through experiencing the question and answer of where we place our physical senses as reality.

the Abstract is an insistent realism pulling through the millennia layers of man's fiction; it's story is made known when a line of our fiction opens to the unknown. the Abstract is not an intangible, it is conceived as such only because we cast it outside the written wall of our experiential world. Art either punctuates the fiction or bares an experience of realized abstraction.

The Tight Bud of Openness, (a subtle shift in a closed system)

"There are times in science when progress can only be made by revolutionary ideas" Nobelprize.org

If matter is never truly created or destroyed, just as its equivalent, energy, but merely changes or re-arranges form from one state to another––any state of matter then is transformation, a transfer of information or potentia (as Aristotle termed it) and with this, what part does our sight and touch play as we are not simply witnesses to but inextricably "of" this––and yet the unaided human eye takes a seat at such a surface level of matter's seeming creation and destruction. Is this deeply ingrained Cartesian philosophical split of mind and matter? What do we "see" with our sense of sight? How is what we see the role of observer and participant in the state of matter? If sight is the resulting perception of visible light that reaches our eye but perhaps even more so the unconscious inference that requires well-known assumptions and patterns based on prior visual experience of the world––the conscious awareness of this and experiences with abstract unknowns can experiment with the resulting perceptions of sight and touch. Perhaps the human brain over the next millenia evolves our somatosensory and other neurological systems––in the meantime, our sense of "knowing" may be a tool into investigating the senses more fully––developing physical senses to the larger base reality of mass and energy––developing another awareness; this is the great opportunity of Art.

In the early spring of 2001, my use of paper, board or canvas as a choice in the immediate dispersal of an idea waned––the preparation of its substrate, a former ritual to the developing blueprint, grew to an almost full disregard of the "vehicleness" of the 2-dimensional plane. Accidental rips, stains, or eventual dissolvement/age of the 2D vehicle brought more intensity to the insistence of the idea at its 2D surface---further dimension(s) were needed. This was reinforced by a complete fascination with the paint itself and how it transformed into another image––every tool, every substrate felt all the more transitory.

The transition into Form, Sculpture was driven by the "existence" of the idea––what if anything is indestructible within any idea. If drawing a Form on paper, the stroke of the charcoal focuses on this––the destructible and the indestructible nature of Form. The stroke of this charcoal line then is similar to a momentary stroke of light in a darkened room.

One of the many reasons science enters my studio is its demand of a simple fundamental persistent openness, a budding thought and this is to remain open to the fact that measurements on the smallest elementary particle level do not bring completely objective results. This point can be as well argued as sustained however regardless of the ouroboros intellectualizing as to what is ever truly objective––this provocational thought reduced to its simplest seed renders one with a tiny mysterious openness and unknown which should be an extension to each of our physical human senses. This again is the great opportunity of Art.

A small openness that desires no answer other than remaining open to what determines what is––this pause in perception in the larger arenas of mass, like with Art, frees the addiction of collapsing all perception immediately into definition, into complete objectivity; again, this demands another awareness––a development of one's sense of the unknown.

“...but what does it mean?” Object vs Information

At the emergence of quantum investigation, Art followed, consciously or not, with Science’s shift from centuries-old object-based system of physical laws into the strong evidence of a more information-based or potentiality-based reality. The interacting billiard ball view of an outside world was being undone from a perspective on the very smallest yet foundational scale.

The question "...what does this mean? when confronted with an Abstract work of Art is illustrative of the point of where Art can lead the viewer/experiencer beyond the old Newtonian object-derivative surface reality towards a system a century of new Science has evidenced as inseparable information of all-potentiality. As viewer becomes experiencer, witness becomes participant, Abstract Form is no longer relegated to someplace outside one’s reality as confronting object or static learning but as inseparable information.

Art presents an experience of this Science. The Abstract is not fixed to an area outside reality, its roots can be evidenced through great invention and new thought breaking the pattern of the habitual.

The physical experience of the Abstract in Modern North American Art (Heizer, De Maria, Turrell) began at the outer edges of shared experience, the uninhabited American Desert, and is now evolving inward, centered within the collective self or populated thought we name City. HELDAN inhabits this landscape. The isolated site for Art becomes almost an isolated occasion if relegated to a separated time or a separated place.

The scientific investigations of the physical laws that govern reality has moved from object centered to content/information centered. The Abstract Forms of Land Art signaled the frontier of this thought, at the horizon of this new landscape. The Abstract is not fixed to an area outside our reality, it is our reality. For over a century, the shift from the old yet still pervasive Newtonian reality as separate object-based content to the quantum suggested reality as inseparable information/potentiality-based content is shown through investigative parallel in Art. HELDAN’s permanent installation within the collective self or City evidences the dissolving or disassociation of objects as outwardly separate interactions in one’s reality to that of inseparable information.

I use Art as a gendenkenexperiment to that experience.

Art as Infrastructure, Unknown Body of Reality and the Scale of Potential

The Information Age has progressed man beyond the need of his own physicality and yet man must still contend with the reality of his body. Through the feats of our Industrial past, man achieved the scale required of living with more than himself. The structure of his bridges, diameters of his water works, tunnels and frontiers of his road and railways are symbols of the iron infrastructure of his collective body named City.

The industrialized materials of a City’s infrastructure holds the familiarity of a public skin. The Forms of the PROTOIST Series render this collective skin for intimate encounter. PROTOIST Forms engender the physical touch of material potentiality for the collective as individual and the individual as collective. At it’s intersection, this Art as infrastructure, the body of the city and individual man are poised at an unknown – a body of reality of ceaseless potential

or the obsolete.

New Realism: Touching the Abstract

The Abstract is more than plastic Works in a museum, indeed, true abstraction is the very world outside. Neurological and somatosensory studies suggest the “outside” world as a percept-dependant sensory construct, what this series of works engenders as abstract realism. Sense perception is not objective and yet centuries-old science pervades the contemporary belief in an independent world of objects patterning self and “outside” reality. Indeed, “objects” have no complete separation in the less perceptible phenomenal worlds that form the life we perceive. Sculpture (Form) conceived for touch dissolves the percept’s veil of separation from “object only” to “experience” as/of self. When these Forms are Abstract, the profound permission of viewer into experiencer brings a third dimension of Abstraction as Self. PROTOIST Forms are Abstract Form; their experience of touch and the context of touch as the sole perception of self and the “outside” world allows for expanded experience in the realism of the Abstract. It is from this foundation Abstraction is the grand medium of direct encounter with the greater reality.