Smaller than reality

You see a picture of a facebook status which reads: At times I feel like I understand everything. It is surprising how little good that does in itself. I become enclosed in my self: truth is smaller than reality.

Screenshot of facebook

See also: Fashionable meditations

You see a young man standing in what appears to be a bathroom. He is wearing a blue tank top and blue shorts. You see him from beneath, in profile, starting from the thighs. You can not see his eyes. His right hand holds a remote release firmly. The flash of the camera has overlit his hand and produced a large shadow to his right.

C-print

See also: You don’t wanna be alive when you’re twenty-five

You see a pencil sketch of a rough circle, a spiral and the lambda symbol.

How I explained it to the people of the museum, Pencil on paper.

I made this drawing the 17th of September 2009, while I had a meeting at the Van Abbe museum. In the weeks leading up to this meeting, my sensation that I understood everything rose. I tried to share my understanding at the meeting and used this drawing as an illustration during this attempt.

The structure of everything. Video, 0:33

This is a model for the mismatch between the words and the things.

There not so many things, there are much more words. And the things are always in a state of flux, thanks to time and causality which keep changing them around.

So while we keep making circles in our minds, revisiting the same words over and over, the same words are never the same because the things they refer to keep changing.

The actual relation between our thoughts and the things is not a circle, it’s a spiral.

Going in circles in mathematical terms would be a parametric plot x: sin(t), y: cos(t) where t is time from 0 to infinity. But this model features a third axis, z, which is equal to t. From a top down perspective it looks just like a circle, but if we shift, we see it is actually a helix, and the points never touch.

You could visualise the point being made as a helix viewed from above: this looks like a circle. Once your viewpoint shifts you see see there is a third axis and the points do not actually touch. The basic parametric formula for such a helix would be: sin(t),cos(t),t.

See also: Bowie, David: Changes (1972); Prince: Sign o’ the Times (1987).