“Entropy Wrangler,” Ian Cheng’s 2013 exhibition at Off Vendome in Dusseldorf, was an excellent introduction to the logic behind this artist’s practice. The centerpiece was a large projection in the gallery’s basement described as “a live computer simulation that changes and evolves, forever.” Like all of Cheng’s simulations, it was programmed with motion capture techniques that register the physical movements of performers that are then translated onto digital bodies. These bodies coexist as individual entities subject to the laws and dynamics of a causal, virtual world: avatars of people and common objects, like hammers and basketball players, rendered in basic three-dimensional form and caught in the zero gravity of the digital screen

Slow room
To bring a life form to a singular lack of motion is to kill it. Museums are repositories of the past. Ideas that lived outside are rendered dead in the careful buildings. Just as dead as the grizzly in the diorama at the Met is the Lichtenstein at the MoMA. The ideas reach a peak and trade their vitality, their life, for an expanded lifespan. The SLOW ROOM was envisioned as an answer to this dilemma… to be in motion to live and die in the museum… to be a part of the system while denying and rejecting the stasis… to embrace the chaos to make the entropy an ally is to understand a fundamental nature of the Universe. SLOW ROOM will live and it will die.

DEPART
The Entropy Gardens
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The Entropy Gardens is an artistic VR experience that explores one of humanity’s most archetypical artforms – garden making. It challenges its myths, aesthetics and modes of perception. Like a garden, The Entropy Gardens attempts to become a spatiotemporal poem — a poetic organism. In the form of a sprawling journey it constructs a hermetic, virtual garden as a poetic ecosystem — a psychic landscape that is foremost a complex audiovisual experience. It admits the visitor into a place that is equally challenging and contemplative (and of course profoundly weird).

Psychometrics
Late capitalist networked culture is obsessed with improving performance. TED speakers are cult idols, sharing their commandments for success and productivity. On social networks our friends become brands, and brands become our friends. Self-help books are interchangeable with business philosophies. In the conference room – and the weekend supplements – we learn how to shape ourselves, how to be consistent, how to operate. Reduce entropy. Maximise consistency. Become an industry of one. You are an engine. One day you’ll fly away.

גיאורג קנטור, לודוויג בולצמן, קורט גדל, אלן טיורינג
dangerous knowledge documentary
whose genius has profoundly affected us (infinity; entropy; incompleteness; thinking machine) , but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

Interference Fit Canyon
“by Maya Alam uses an entropic drawing process to capture the coalescence of solid and fluid states of matter within a single object. The drawing is comprised of contours that delineate a cube with hard edges that appear to be soft from particular vantage points and soft edges that appear to be hard from others. These contours are mapped back onto the cube geometry in a transitional process whereby the legibility of the cube becomes progressively more inscrutable. The drawing process parallels the effects created by the presence of a cubic object within the L.A. River that disrupts the flow of water and accentuates the presence of detritus. A process of continual erosion acts differentially on the object over time, transforming its appearance and performance in relation to water flow”. Marcelyn Gow

Tumble Room
Mr. Kersels was born in Los Angeles and attended UCLA for both his undergraduate and graduate educations, receiving a BA in art in 1984 and an MFA in 1995. His body of work ranges from the collaborative performances with the group SHRIMPS (1984-1993) to large-scale sculptures such as Tumble Room (2001). His interest in machines, entropy, sound, and dissolution has produced work that examines the dynamic tension between failure and success, the individual and the group, and the thin line between humor and misfortune.

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town,“Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”

entropy

“Entropy” installation is a thermo cam image of a horse’s body cooling down after its death. The corpse’s hottest areas are indicated with red colour and the coldest areas with blue and black. Visual evidence of life’s presence slowly vanishes as heat flees from the horse’s body. The original documentation, lasting for several hours, is edited down to a half an hour. Presented as a life-size projection.
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CHAMPIONS OF ENTROPY

As a sculptor, I am interested in objects that act as catalyst for an anti-environment – a mindset or space that is not defined, and therefore, infinite in possibilities.The human tendency towards ordering has become an extension of ownership – to understand opens up the possibility of manipulation.Sculpture works in opposition to this.Sculpture is a demonstration of entropy – entropy being the measurable amount of disorder within any system. The system, in this case, is all order. Sculpture is potentially anarchy. The sculptural object is a celebration of wavering logic and structure, exposing the eminent disorder within all systems.

Entropy Mural Moroccos