From the Infinitely Small to the Infinitely Large: Matter / Memory / Interactivity / Cosmos

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Jean-Marc Philippe

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FROM THE INFINITELY SMALL TO THE INFINITELY LARGE: MATTER/MEMORY/INTERACTIVITY/COSMOS¹

On the edge of eternity, in arrested time, Sculpture had always shown itself immutable and frozen.

And time, save for its torments, its patina or its scars, ignored it. The Artist, “forever” of course, had been content with this, never imagining that Memory might one day be stored in Matter, and that this Memory too, just like Matter itself, might offer itself to his own sculptor's knives, gouges and chisels.

A sculptor of memory and of matter?... An alchemy of the mind? No, a sign of the times... the sign of a civilisation of Technology and Science, of Research and Development, offering us passers-by so many unprecedented means of creation, as so many potential extensions of our gestures and our thought, and of our capacity for invention too.

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The fruit of the interface between one of today's cutting-edge technologies and the intuition of an artist (myself), the “TOTEM OF THE FUTURE” is a massive metal sculpture, with Memory, which opens the door to a literally unheard-of imaginary world. Unheard-of inasmuch as — and I insist on this — although it is entirely and massively metallic (Nickel/Titanium), its forms will evolve naturally through an infinity of shapes, shapes that it will previously have been “taught”, and that will reappear spontaneously in a play of predictable interactions with one of the parameters characterising the external conditions of its environment: temperature.

Such a sculpture will therefore “breathe” and “evolve” as the moments pass, and this without the intermediary of any sensor or electronic chip whatsoever, but by calling upon one of the properties of matter at the atomic scale, a property discovered only a few years ago.

This property, suspected in 1932 and studied in detail since 1965 by the world's leading atomic-physics laboratories, and which to this day still lacks a satisfactory theoretical explanation, would reveal to us that: “it was possible to ‘teach’ certain metal alloys FORMS, forms which these alloys would at first ‘memorise’, forms which they could subsequently ‘restore’, and this solely through the variations in temperature they would later come to encounter!…

And the imagination catches fire, perceiving that, thanks to this capacity offered by matter to store memory, one might envisage evolving sculptures with memory, sculptures without any reference which, once the matter had been “tamed”, could

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evolve with the passing of days and nights, as with the passing of the seasons, in a relationship bordering on the uncanny with those rhythms and cycles of the Cosmos that we know.

Thus the TOTEM OF THE FUTURE — in its 5-metre-high version, to be followed by a 15-metre version — is the first evolving sculpture with memory, already acknowledged as a “first”, and one which, in its field, will very probably come to mark a milestone and serve as a reference, inasmuch as it opens up an entirely new practice for Sculpture, one that overturns its deepest traditional foundations.

Indeed, the sculptor will no longer have to think solely through one single form, finished and frozen in its eternity; henceforth, on the contrary, a new latitude will be offered to him: that of conceiving, within one and the same work, an infinity of forms linked to one another by memory — memory called upon and activated by one of the parameters of its environment, memory which, in his unconscious, the artist will have to integrate as a new material in its own right. This is what has been my own experience over these past eight years, and I have lived it as something bordering at once on intoxication and enchantment.

A tremendous new challenge thus opened up for the artist: to create, within one and the same work, a sequence of forms that would have to “recognise” one another, but also all “love” one another, like the notes of a single musical score.

The TOTEM OF THE FUTURE aspires to this.

Moreover, as its name suggests, it also seeks to build a bridge between our traditions and our future.

Tradition is indeed present in it, inasmuch as the TOTEM OF THE FUTURE, seen from the front at the harshest moments of winter, explicitly refers to the Greek letter “Psi”, which evokes the notion of the “Soul”. Seen from the front again, but in summer, when the sun shines at its zenith with its greatest intensity, the TOTEM OF THE FUTURE then refers to the shape of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that signified “Life”.

The infinity of forms linking these extreme configurations — this “soul” and this “life” — derives from the family of cycloids, those mathematical curves which in their own way express the notions of cycles and rhythms, as do our days, our nights, our seasons and our years too. And if an esoteric symbolism, a hidden poem, sought to “speak” this TOTEM OF THE FUTURE, one would very certainly find in it the idea that between “Life” and the “soul”, as we name them on our planet, there is no binding thread but these few cycles and rhythms — our days, our seasons and perhaps billions of years — which speak to us of the cosmos too.

The future, for its part, is also contained in this pioneering use of technologies now diverted from their strict applications, essentially military or nuclear in purpose — technologies that will also concern “the things of the mind”, when the mind proceeds from Art.

But one cannot fail to note here that, in order to meet the technical specifications for such a concept of an evolving sculpture with memory, fundamental research had to make spectacular progress, and the RAYCHEM CORPORATION group, world leader in this technology of Shape-

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Memory Alloys, devoted to it a specific budget of nearly $1.5 million, which came on top of the.... $200 million that the same group had already invested in this technology over the past twenty years — for other applications, naturally.

In the same vein, one may also note that, to be brought to completion, this first evolving sculpture with memory required several years of full-time work by an engineer, Philippe Poncet, backed by the world specialist in these Nickel/Titanium memory alloys, Tom Duerig, not to mention the help of several technicians, all belonging to the “Metal Division” of the RAYCHEM group in Menlo Park (California)².

As for its visual description, the TOTEM OF THE FUTURE in winter quite naturally takes its low form, folded and slumped in on itself so as to be, in the sharpest cold, in near hibernation, which only the few pale rays of a winter sun can animate a little.

In spring, on the other hand, awakening, the TOTEM OF THE FUTURE will rise and evolve between days and nights so as, imperceptibly, a little more each day, to glide towards its summer form in which, beneath the most scorching sun, it will stand fully upright, revealing at last its most fully blossomed forms.

And then, as autumn comes, it will very gently return towards its winter forms… And the passer-by will then know that he has completed a full circuit, carried along by his planet around its mother star — here its driving force as well.

“Inanimate objects, have you then a soul?” — so his intuition had long ago made the poet say… and elsewhere… elsewhere too, was there not talk of “a simple staff that turned into a serpent, which in turn could become a staff again”, as its owner (or its master) so wished…. but we must know here that this owner and master was none other than Moses himself, if the Bible speaks true…

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Why, when I was asked to take part in this publication on interactivity, was I tempted not to recount the sequel to the “MESSAGES FROM HUMANKIND TO THE UNIVERSE”³ operation, but rather to evoke here these evolving sculptures with memory?

No doubt because there is in these sculptures a very particular and unsuspected theatre of interactivity, carried, dimensionally speaking, to its very extremes. Extremes that link the infinitely small, at the atomic scale where the active site of the phenomenon of memory in matter lies, with the infinitely large in its rhythms of cosmic origin, which make the length of our days, our nights, our seasons and our years. These durations express the dimensions, masses and energies of the Sun/Earth system, which also directly govern the movements of the TOTEM OF THE FUTURE, itself carried along by the trajectories and rotations of its own planet… and whose temperatures are directly related to the photons reaching it from its own mother star…

Interactivity, once you have us in your grip… and immaterial strings are pulled from the sky, where are you leading us?

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Winter / Spring / Summer — “Totem of the Future” 1989, San Francisco, Menlo Park, Jean-Marc Philippe