Amy Nelsen
| The Chance Clock |
I began my quest by asking: what makes a blackbox? The first answer that came to mind was "assumptions." So, I began to think... what are the best , most dependable assumptions we have? I thought long and hard, and in the end it was my Dad who came up with the best 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. My next thought was, what would happen if I combined a set of blackboxes? Would they hold true? What if their intended outputs were quite different ones? So my second blackbox was chance. Ah, chance-- by definition, simply not reliable. Say what you will about quantum mechanics, string theory, and supreme beings, but you will never convince me that anything other than chance made me pull an ace from the top of the deck. In the end, my project became a linguistic (and almost mathematical) test : Time is reliable. Chance is not reliable. Time must not be chance. And yet... (Ironically, it won't keep time correctly! Perhaps the assumptions prevailed.) |
