My draft letter, written while reading your last one, says “I’m confident that it won’t get in the way of future letters.” I suppose I need to reconsider that line.
I love it, I’m all for using over-the-top scientific measures to compare things. Let’s stick with visual artworks. You can definitely apply measures like that, humour me while I fumble to do such a thing as a physicist. It might help me think if I break down the steps: 1) decide on an accurate measure, 2) set an anchor or decide which way is “up”, 3) measure it (I’m trying my best not to include any notion of intention or value here, but I suspect we’ll find it’s inevitable. )
Let’s say we have a Van Gough, a Pollock and a doodle by my newborn, drawn by taping a brush to her hand as she flails around with minimal coordination. I first need to decide what I’ll measure. Trying my best not to make a value judgement I’d say we should measure how far something is from being created by chance.
This gives us a rough dimension, but we need to anchor it. You either anchor it to some independent quantity that doesn’t change (absolute measure) or you anchor it to another artwork (relative measure).
In the relative case you can merely say that two things are “X units different”. If this is the case you can extract slightly more meaning from the measure if you’re willing to make an arbitrary choice about which is “bigger” than the other. This is giving the measure a bearing or direction. Then you can at least say one thing is “X units bigger”.
So let’s give a bearing that more random is “shitter” (s>) then we’d probably get that Baby s> Pollock s>Van Gough.
I’d say you’d want an absolute measure. Well absolute measures are the holy grail of physics. When we didn’t know what temperature was, we had only awkward relative measures (Fahrenheit). But when we discovered that temperature was the average vibration of atoms and that absolute zero was the point when atoms stopped vibrating, we discovered a “bottom”. Things can’t move less than this and suddenly this anchor allows all other temperatures to be lined up absolutely.
So that’s why I choose how far it is from chance, because there’s a bottom anchor. Purely random is white noise, purely random colours. We don’t need to say one is shitter than the other because the absolute anchor lets us say that one is “randomer” than the other.1)But purely ordered artworks are also pretty shit, so all in all it’s probably a bad measure. I swear I’ve seen good measures along this vein though.
In both cases though, I don’t know if the human can ever be removed. They either make their judgement in the relative case when they chose the bearing of “shitter”, or, even with a randomer rule in hand, looking at the works on the wall they need to decide what randomer actually means aesthetically. In physics this is less of a problem because there are other things that give the measure meaning apart from human enjoyment. To continue with the example of heat. Something that is hotter reliably reacts faster in a chemical reaction. Something that is hotter can reliably transfer useful work for a heat engine). So the mapping hotter = better for reactions is valid and requires no value judgement. the mapping hotter = better, does.
My idea of eclipsing is a tool to allow measurement when you don’t even have stage 1), the accurate measure. Everything above still applies it’s just that it’s really common for measures to be imprecise. A precise measure means that I could zoom in and discern a difference. That would be enabled by your “smooth running film”, but I don’t think it’s possible. I’m not too worried if “it must be there” logically, you physically need to measure it for it to count. And if you can’t measure it (bad measure, chaotic environment, physical limits on resolution) it doesn’t exist, or at least you can’t say anything meaningful – was that not the original purpose of this avenue of thinking? To get a resolution you can rely on? Eclipses provide us with a discontinuous measure, provided the two things to compare are vastly different.
Shittily,
Mat
Footnotes
| ↑ 1. | But purely ordered artworks are also pretty shit, so all in all it’s probably a bad measure. I swear I’ve seen good measures along this vein though. |