Amy Nelsen
| The Chanceclock |
Initally, the most salient feature of blackboxes seemed to be the amount of assumption associated with them. What I really wanted to do with my first project was, in a very simplistic way, refute the base assumptions of common blackboxes. So, I began to think... what is the most commom, most dependable assumption we have? I thought long and hard, and in the end it was my Dad who came up with my favorite answer: Time. Time, in my mind, is the one thing that is truly reliable. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred and... you can finish for me. It's always there. The second blackbox I chose was chance-- because, by definition it is the opposite of time. Empircally unreliable. Say what you will about quantum mechanics and higher powers, but I will never be conviced that anything other than chance made me pull an ace from the top of the deck. In the end my project became a linguistic, almost mathematical test: X is equal to Z, Y is not equal to Z. X must not equal Y. Time is reliable. Chance is not reliable. Therefore, time must not be chance and chance must not be time. And yet... |
