#zone2source

Sjef van Gaalen goes with the flow in Amsterdam

"Liquified Sky" (LINE_063) from LINE.

We're at the Glass House in Amstelpark, Amsterdam for zone2source; a talk by Jean Marc Chomaz. Among other things, he’s introducing a screening of shorts from a video art project called Liquified Sky. That it needs some introduction becomes apparent as the evening wears on, dissolving and recombining in a series of complex flows, vortices, circulations, layered lasers and barely visible jellyfish.

The point of all this is that the mind is not a mechanism. Mechanical metaphors (computer, telegraph, internet, a steam engine) are just that - metaphors. The brain’s operations remain messy, fluid, and largely unpredictable - more like the weather than the mechanical reductionists care to admit.

Jean Marc Chomaz opens his presentation with a soap bubble. For him it's a means to visualise the fluid dynamics of a planetary atmosphere. An atmosphere is finite but unbounded. Once you know what energies are entering the system, you can forecast its behaviours. Forecast, but not control. Phenomena arise and dissipate across scales in numbers and at rates that make a mockery of ordinary causality. Within that soap-bubble layer (its thickness, incidentally, reflecting quite accurately the thickness of Earth’s atmosphere), highly complex systems interoperate, confused by interference effects that are still, in some cases, barely understood. For the next hour, Jean Marc tours us through his work of recent years. A distinguished specialist in ecology and climatology, a prolific collaborator, and a strong advocate of public education in science and the arts, he has a lot to show, but what really matters is his attitude. He alludes to science but does not hide behind it. He speaks from conviction. Some issues are too serious to wait for formal proof he says. Homeostatic systems are as ordinary as soap bubbles - and still we lack the language to describe them. Faced with such systems, we owe it to ourselves to respond to them as complete human beings. We are bigger than our languages, richer than our systems. And in any attempt to understand the flows of space and time around us, every scale must be considered at once.

@thesjef

Liquified Sky is a data DVD released on the LINE imprint. Further background and reviews can be found on the LINE website.

MORE ARTS COVERAGE

In Exit Strategies, out now, Claire Dean meets artists bent on making J G Ballard’s Crystal World a reality. (Read an extract here.)