Star Destroyers and Invisible Cats
Hang on, this is a dense one. Fair warning.
Big news right now is the marketing of NFTs, nonfungible tokens. We all know that fungible means, in lawyer speak, "the ability to replace or be replaced by an identical item; mutual interchangeability." Therefore, nonfungible means unique, one-of-a-kind, like you, or that tree by my door, or the snowflake on my glove. The "token" part means that it's a thing, an actual object, like a ticket that gets you into the ball game. There's only one for that one seat, (but just to be clear, it's not the seat itself). People are investing in NFTs, purchasing online for actual money, a slice of a program, a bit of code that exists in the blockchain universe, which we cannot see or touch or taste or smell. In fact, most of the purchases are paid for with cryptocurrency. I don't see too many problems with this. Do you? Maybe. Wanna buy a bridge in North Korea? I can hook you up.
Nihonium is element #113 on the Periodic Chart. It is accepted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry as a member of the known universe of atoms, the actual stuff that makes up everything there is. After seven years of pursuit, scientists in a lab in Japan created one atom that instantly disappeared because it is super unstable, radioactive to the point of immediate self annihilation. Three more atoms have been made in total, just to confirm the experiment's results. Estimates suggest it is the most expensive thing on earth; a single atom is at least 7.5 million dollars. A gram of the stuff would run about 45 octillion dollars or more than the value of the entire earth at current market prices. I know a guy who knows a guy... just saying.
Speaking of elemental coolness, or hotness, Neodymium and Yttrium and Aluminum in a garnet crystalline matrix is the finest laser producing stuff we have found. Well, not me personally, but the royal "we". I'm trapped in Vermont in my studio because of a global pandemic, but in Magurele, Romania, a project called ELI, the Extreme Light Infrastructure, is hard at work. In October of last year, they created a laser beam convergence with ten petawatts of power. Ten petawatts is the equivalent of one tenth of all the sunlight currently hitting the earth, easily more juice than the entire power grid in this country. The duration of the event was 23 femtoseconds. A femtosecond, as I'm sure you all know, is one millionth of a billionth of a second, or, more familiarly, one quadrillionth of a second. Woo hoo, high fives all around. Awesome!
Yesterday, I found myself in the gallery with a friend discussing what I do. The gist of the conversation was me describing my work as a duality. The art itself is the experience of the way light moves when you, the perceiver, move around in front of the slab of metal in the present light conditions. That is what I make. That is what I sell. The piece of stainless steel on the wall is necessary, as are some photons wandering about the room (at the speed of light) and your eyeballs and brain having the experience of those photons. The piece of metal is not the art, although it is required, as are you, as is light. So, my artwork is about making a tangible thing to create an intangible moment in your life's experience. It's ephemeral, like the ELI event. But it can be replicated, continuously, if you like, unlike Nihonium. By duality, I mean that I make an object, a thing that you can touch, but the essence of the art is that it is not a thing. It's more like an NFT, or a wonderful memory, or the way certain songs make you feel. Unlike an NFT, it's always a little different. Wear a different shirt, light the candles, open the shades, dim the lights... And unlike an NFT, no hacking will ever occur. I promise. There is only one possible iteration of every piece that I have ever made, and there it is, hanging on the wall, reflecting and refracting light. Unless you believe in parallel universe theories. We will take that up another time.
So then, what is the theme here? Magic? Science? Absurdity? Art? All of the above? You can buy a screenshot of a flying cat with a pop tart body trailing rainbows for some amount of money, or something like money, that somebody somewhere decided was the correct value. Making the assumption, naturally, that only you have the only one, and that assigned value is not arbitrary. Seems like a great deal of assuming to me, AND you are buying something with all the soul of a QR code. Personally, I would recommend an actual thing -- real art that you hang in a real room in your home, that dynamically feeds you freshness moment to moment until you pass it along to your kids. Good art becomes a good friend. As an investment? Maybe the pop tart cat. As life experiences? I recommend museums and concerts and trips outside and really, really strong art to share with your family and friends...
Well, you get the drift, I think. Conceptually, the whole NFT thing is crazy. Yet cool in a virtual reality, what-will-they-think-of-next sort of a way. Giant laser beams, wicked cool. Blasting atoms into matter at speeds approaching warp? Super cool. Pushing light around to mess with your experience of right now? Best thing ever.
Hope is radiating down from that bright ball in the sky, dear friends.
More hugs every day. Real hugs, not "air" gestures masquerading as human warmth.
Springtime is renewal. This one in particular.
Peace out. And inner peace too.
B Mac
