I bought this print to decorate the wall of my office. I like the art, and the title is “Time’s Arrow,” so how could I resist?
But I did have a worry: the painting clearly involved text, which I tend to think is an aesthetic mistake — it brings a depressing specificity to what should be an open-ended interpretive process. And here the resolution of the online image was too small for me to make out the words, so what if the text was completely dopey?
Now it has arrived, and here is the main text:
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
The artist never entirely knows. We guess; we may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
I kind of like it.
Comments
15 responses to “A Form of Not Being Sure”
The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
Which is to say, your wavefunction begins to collapse.
Sean,
Brilliant!
Claire
The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
Which is to say, your wavefunction begins to collapse.
If the wavefunction and collapse are real, and something other than a wavefunction induces the collapse, then is the wavefunction fundamental? 😉
I like the words, but not the art.
It is basically what Nick Bostrom was saying in the Edge – “What have you changed your mind about” articles.
“The artist never entirely knows. We guess; we may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
Isn’t this even an accurate description of the big game i.e. science.
I think you loose something when you do not include the writing at the top?
Not to upset anyone or anything like that, but I’ve seen copies of this same Costa work titled simply “Arrow”, not “Time’s Arrow”. I’m not sure Costa even put a title to it–it may be mere marketing by a copy-making company to even call it “Arrow”.
Perhaps Costa thought of it as “Brown Coil Thingy With Arty Philosophical Text”. Doesn’t matter–I’d hang it on the wall of my office too (if I had an office).
The surprise moment – when you say YES – the forest is open – nothing else matters . Who is this Costa guy ? – When it comes to the real thing everyone knows it when they see it. I do and of that I am sure.
What does the line at the top say?
Random Association – it’s a Haribo Liquorice Spiral. Amusingly the website lists it as ‘benchmark of German design’, maybe I should pin a couple of them to my walls.
I thought it was a spiral-torsion spring. The Victorians used them for a remarkable amount of things, and I’ve read at least one SF story that suggested they could replace the internal combustion engine…
Artistic, but math-lacking. It needs a few more equations etched into it (say, formula for entropy?).
Sean:
Nice post thanks. Let me comment what i feel with all these science studies that pretend to explain science (in context or not). Suppose that they find something very deep, essential to scientific knowledge production. At the same moment science will be dead (or perhaps will be converted into technology). It is impossible to know why science works, if you do it you kill it.
The same applies to any artistic activity.
Happy new year, and thanks for your post in this very nice blog.
But doesn’t knowing something open our minds to proportionally more questions? So that would mean we are even more alive.