A meteorological approach. Approaching, never arriving.

Communication sent in the hope of being received.


There is always interference.

In the gallery a beam of light glows within the darkened space, reflected from mirror to mirror, drawing a line through the intermittent haze and producing a constellation of circles. It radiates out, like a golden record, like a signal hoping to find a receiver. Continually emitting. Continually waiting.

In the mid-20th century, the dominant theory of information was formulated without concern for the context of the receiver. There was a receiver, yes, a universalised receiver; but not
a specific person in a particular context. That would only complicate things. Writing about this theory of information, proposed by Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, Katherine Hayles has said that it divorced information from meaning, presenting information as pattern—probability—rather than presence. In this theory information was disembodied, an abstraction: ‘a mathematical quantity weightless as sunshine, moving in a rarefied realm of pure probability, not tied down to bodies or material instantiations.’[1] 

Kinly Grey’s Horizon sets up what could be taken for an abstraction; a light sculpture, an installation, creating shapes in space that seem to extend beyond the physical limits of the gallery itself as the light reflects off the surface of each mirror but simultaneously plunges into the mirror’s depths. My points of reference for such abstraction might include Bridget Riley, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Calder or Olafur Eliasson. But also the sunrise, an eclipse, a metal disc on a necklace, or the ancient technology of the sundial. These things tell us something; none of these things are without meaning.

But this is not pure abstraction. There is a tin can, painted and strapped with gaffer tape to a basic lamp; there are structures, hand-made out of recycled wood, supporting the weight of second-hand mirrors more suited to a domestic environment, their scalloped edges refracting the light; and there is mist in the air—water particles emitted from a haze machine. These are ‘found’ things; they have prior lives. These prior lives, embedded within their materiality, draw the world into the gallery.

Oh, and there is me.

Wiener and Shannon’s approach to information was opposed way back then, in the 1940s, by Donald MacKay whose own model of information attempted to describe not what information is but what it does. Taking into account the state of the receiver both before and after receiving the message, MacKay’s theory included meaning and was consequently reflexive: it considered the context of the receiver as part of the communication process, and also included the effects on a person observing the exchange. Reflexivity—‘the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates’[2]—was unnerving for many of the scientists and mathematicians initially trying to theorise information. They wanted to reliably transmit information from point A to point B and know that the value of the information they sent was the same as that received (and the digital technologies of our contemporary world depend upon such reliability). MacKay’s reflexive alternative—in which both the receiver and the observer are changed as a result the process of communication and can, in turn, be observed by other observers—opened up the possibility of ‘the potential for a reflexive spiral through an infinite regress of observers.’[3] Relay without end.

And, in addition to this potential infinity-mirror of effect, if we are going to consider context then we have to contend with the materiality of all those things that form the context: bodies, buildings, cables, metals, and the loud rain falling outside the window, just to name a few. We can’t just calculate information like it’s sunshine—like the information passing between you and me, or flitting around the world via the Internet, for example, has no body, no weight[4]—and expect successful communication, can we? Are my neurons not physical? Is my phone not filled with minerals? These things mean something.

But if you have a nice set of rules in place to control the communication of information—to control the context in which information is measured—you don’t want observers getting in the way, do you? Observers—those unpredictable, uncontrollable creatures—ruin everything. As soon as the observer gets a foot in, as Hayles says, ‘cracks in the frame radiate outward until the perspectives that controlled context are fractured as irretrievably as a safety-glass windshield hit by a large rock.’[5] Or, I would like to propose, an asteroid.

(There’s always the possibility of fiction—or the improbable—interrupting your science.)

The golden record aboard Voyager 1 is currently in interstellar space, 13,410,063,445 miles from Earth[6] (it will be further by the time you’re reading this). The record is a message; it is hope. It will keep going and going until it crashes into a receiver. Or an asteroid.

In the gallery, the lamp projects a golden beam of light; each mirror reflects the beam further and further into space; particles in the air make the light visible; and the light lands on a wall, projecting a golden circle, a stage. The particles dance in the beam as I touch it with my hand, interrupting the light and creating shadows and double shadows as echoes of my presence. These shadows are not abstract; they are an ancient language, and they reverberate around the room. I am definitely here.

Notes

[1] Hayles, N. Katherine, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999, p.56


[2] Ibid., p.8

[3] Ibid., p.56

[4] Cubitt, Sean, “The Weight of the Internet: Environmental Cost of Going Digital.” Artlink v.29 No. 4, 2009. p. 22. https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/3312/environmental-costs-of-going-digital/

[5] Hayles, op. cit., p.70

[6] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/