Entropic Noise

Artists have used the theme of entropy as an inspiration in their work for some time, most  famously in Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) amongst minimalist artists who sought to produce work ‘against the ages (his writing ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969) where he speaks of minimalist artists who seek to produce work ‘against the ages’. This participatory unfinished practice is a key methodological influence in the project.  The consideration of entropy as a creative, critical process of social engagement is seen most readily in the work of Joseph Beuys, whose focus on substance-as-process fundamentally prioritised the life-cycle of objects as they relate to theory-community (such as Honey Pump, 1970.  More recently Anya Gallachio has exemplified this concern for the forces of decay with her own installations, such as the decomposing flowers of preserve ‘beauty’ (1991-2003). Of particular interest to this project is Julian Charriere's The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories (2014) that sees him blowtorching ice in a continued manipulation of the flow of time through artistic practice.The methodology of ‘evidentiary art’ whereby science and art are combined in order to track material and structural changes within objects and processes, is a consequential chosen practice-based framework (most famously exemplified in the legal evidentiary work of Forensic Architecture).  Artists have also been equally mesmerised by ice, with Olafur Eliasson’s melting ice from the Arctic outside the Tate Modern in Ice Watch (2014), and others such as Llka Raupach, Frank Nordiek, Wolfgung Buntrock and Raner Jacob. 

Both destructive and creative, the entropic process denotes wider social and structural changes - the inevitable decay that we have come to understand as the ‘arrow of time’ within the creation of the world around us. And yet we see society as denying this through the forms of control innate within legal development resulting in the ‘orderliness’ of human-made legality. Our concern in this project is this denied ‘geomythical’ materiality of law, the cultural and linguistic interactions with its surroundings, from oral to written, and back again, and what entropy can tell us of these human and non-human relations as a result.

The logic of entropy suggests a focus on the life-cycle of objects, languages and histories, prioritising the materiality and temporality of substances above abstract or concrete form, speaking to a moment in time and less a depiction of something whole and ordered. It is our point of departure to argue that the process of entropy can in substantial ways act as a framework by which to engage with our environment and the legal, cultural, material and social interconnections which rely upon it.

Entropy itself denotes the indisciplining, as a methodology as well as a research context.  

This investigation sits within broader frameworks of speculative and new materialist thought  that questions the division between the subject and object and our perceived correlation with  the world as humans. In framing the way narrative and storytelling can symbiotically generate material futures, in a similar vein to new materialist thinking that sees a convergence of language and matter in the making of the world, such as described in the work of Karen Barad and others. Storytelling is a key manner of relating and passing on customs and histories, laws and norms, within society, such as most clearly demonstrated within the Indigenous cultures engaged within this project.

Entropy itself takes on a number of forms: negative entropy, excess entropy, system entropy, total entropy, maximum entropy, and zero entropy. At its heart, entropy is the measure of impurity or uncertainty - in engineering applications, for instance, information is analogous to signal, and entropy is analogous to noise.

Entropy, as a ‘signal’, indicates a framework by which to both perceive uncertainty and potentiality. Pointing beyond the limits of the immediate, the primacy of information, it speaks to a broader horizon – a space of unknowing, the temporalities, intensities and magnitudes of everyday human life. By such a framing, entropy bridges the philosophical and the scientific: a sign of the ‘as yet unknown’ by which Jean-Luc Nancy located the act of listening (Nancy, 2007);  and of the indeterminancy of scientific experimentation, in which ‘Scientists, here, are no longer those who bring stable ‘‘proofs’’ but uncertainties’ (Isabelle Stengers, 2000: 144).