Wrestling with Entropy

The sheet of copper I left on the workbench overnight has already started to darken at the edges. I hadn’t done anything to it yet, just cut it to size and walked away, and already the reaction was underway. Every mark I make will fade. The metal is oxidizing as I shape it, but somewhere along the way that oxidation stopped being the problem and became the work’s language.

For a long time I treated entropy as the enemy. My early training was in preservation, in fighting the tendency of things to fall apart. The studio taught me otherwise.

Working with corrosion means working with acids. Hydrochloric acid, ferric chloride, vinegar solutions of varying strength. The fumes are sharp and specific: not the clean sting of a laboratory, but something heavier, metallic, that settles in the back of the throat and stays for hours after I’ve left the studio. My fingertips are perpetually stained, the skin thickened in places from handling copper and steel sheets, from the small burns you stop noticing after a while. There is a particular smell that comes when acid first meets zinc (acrid, almost sweet) and it has become so familiar that it marks the beginning of the working day more reliably than coffee.

In my series “Compositions in Corrosion”, I set up conditions for transformation using experimental patination. I choose my metals, mix my acids, control temperature and moisture, time my interventions. But the actual oxidation unfolds according to chemistry rather than aesthetics. Rust follows its own logic. It does not care about my intentions.

I remember a specific moment with the piece that became The Sainte-Foy Conjecture. I had laid out a sheet of mixed metals and applied a diluted acid wash, expecting the usual progression, the slow bloom of burnt sienna into umber. Instead, over two days, a blue-green oxidation spread across the surface in patterns that looked almost geological, like aerial photographs of river deltas. Malachite veins branching through a field of warm copper. I stood looking at it on a Tuesday morning, still in my coat. That turquoise was not mine.

The collaboration is real, but it is not symmetrical. Sometimes the metal responds with unexpected beauty: color patterns and crystalline formations that emerge from processes I initiated but cannot control. Other times, the oxidation simply eats through the surface I spent weeks preparing. A piece I had been nursing along for a month, adjusting the moisture daily, checking the patina each morning. Gone in a single night when the temperature dropped and condensation pooled in exactly the wrong place. The piece does not care. It will continue oxidizing whether I watch it or not. A painter I know from Arnhem came to the studio once and spent a long time in front of Frozen Lake, a piece where the patina had settled into pale horizontal striations, like sediment layers in stone. She said it looked like something that had been buried and dug up. I told her the surface was only six weeks old. She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It remembers more than six weeks.”

I am not the author of anything here. I bring things into proximity.

I watched a piece last winter (iron sheet, ferric chloride wash, three weeks of controlled humidity) go through amber, deep ochre, and finally a black that swallowed light. Each stage was its own composition. Each stage destroyed the previous one. I photographed them all, but the photographs are flat. They don’t carry the smell of it, or the way the surface felt under my thumb when the oxide was still fresh.

Each time I begin again, clearing the table, cutting a new sheet, mixing a fresh batch of acid, there is something of Sisyphus in it. But Sisyphus did not have an artist’s statement to write. Maybe he was simply attentive. Each time the boulder rolls down, it takes a slightly different path. What looks like meaningless repetition might actually be careful observation of variation.

I keep making work. The paradox of temporary meaning is not something you solve.

In “Moving Order” I write code that generates compositions, thousands of possibilities, far more than I could ever evaluate. The machine produces faster than consciousness can judge. Which accidents are worth preserving?

Late one night I was running a new iteration, watching the screen fill with generated compositions (forty, sixty, a hundred) scrolling past too fast to properly see. Most were noise. Then one stopped me. A cluster of weighted forms had settled into the lower third, dense and dark, with a single pale element drifting high and to the left. It looked like something I had seen in the corrosion work, that same tension between mass and absence. My chest tightened the way it does when a patina reveals something unexpected. I sat there for a long time, not touching the keyboard, just looking. The screen glowed faintly in the dark studio. The composition had no smell, no texture, no oxide bloom, and yet my hands recognized it.

I’m not programming art. I’m programming situations where art might emerge from the interplay between systematic processes and human recognition. In both the corrosion work and the algorithmic compositions, I’m trying to read the signatures of temporary organizations. They leave traces: in oxidation patterns, in emergent digital forms, in the accumulated experience of making work at the edge of control.

I have built an entire practice on the idea that entropy is generative, that dissolution enables emergence, that working at the boundary between order and chaos is where interesting things happen. Sometimes I believe this. Sometimes, standing in the studio with a ruined piece, I feel the philosophy collapse. All the elegant thinking about entropy and emergence and transjective beauty. Elaborate rationalization for not being successful. Armor made of sentences.

Then the next reaction surprises me. A patina settles into something I could not have imagined, and I find myself reaching for the framework again. Not because it is true. Because it is the only one I have.

Tomorrow I will clear the table, cut a new sheet of zinc, and mix a fresh chloride solution. The metal will do what it does.