From the Observer:
‘One of the most audacious British art thefts, the disappearance of a two-tonne Henry Moore sculpture worth £3m, has been solved by police, who believe that the internationally revered Reclining Figure sculpture was melted down and sold for no more than £1,500.
The bronze sculpture was stolen from the 72-acre estate of the Henry Moore Foundation in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, in December 2005. The theft baffled art and crime experts and sparked a global hunt for the culprits.
Police feared at first that it had been stolen to order, but investigations suggest it was taken by a group of travellers from Essex and that the metal may have ended up feeding China’s growing demand for electrical components.’
Maybe there’s a bit of Moore in your Ipod?
Full story here.
Physicists are now referring to the stuff the universe is made from as ‘information’, as apposed to ‘matter’ which was the favourite for quite some time. This interests me as, of course, information is the very stuff I’m trying to get to grips with in net.weight.
The theory states that the universe is determined by indestructible information. This information is contained within matter - which can be broken down. It’s all described in a lovely article about pushing an elephant into a black hole, and what happens to the poor thing during and, possibly, afterwards. (read the article here)
It’s relevance to net.weight is less cruel. Information cannot be destroyed - does this mean that the volume of information grows? Continually multiplies like bacteria?
I’ve already mentioned that photons (which carry the information of the net) have no, or at least a practically immeasurable, mass. I make the assumption then that this information also takes up a practically immeasurable space. It is only measurable by the information you read from it - or rather, the amount of information it holds i.e. bytes.
According to the Big Bang theory ‘all the matter and energy in the universe was at an immense temperature and density’. All matter? Does this mean that all matter - and therefor all information - already exists in the universe, just hanging around wanting to be discovered and quantified by man?
The Deterministic view would be that yes, all this information had been held there and, at the moment of the Big Bang, got flung out across the expanding universe. Deterministic philosophers would have us believe that the path of this information is already set, that the moment each photon, electron, neutron etc… was released from that infinitely dense mass its direction would determine its fate. Causality would ensure that as particles collide their directions would alter, ensuring they would collide with other particles and so on. John F Sowa suggests that the laws of causality (such as they stand) do not apply to the atomic level - but that it is more a combination of random, semi-random and deterministic conditions.
However, I quite like the idea that everything that exists now always existed (in some form of basic information) from the very beginning of time, and that it has been hurtling towards its end along a path which was decided by its position at the moment of the Big Bang. This could mean that the weight of total information is a constant and a percentage of this is the data of the internet. This percentage changes as the internet grows. Where does the other information go, the information that was lost to make room for a thousand new flickr accounts?
Vigilance is a location-specific installation sited in two vacant shop units at the Duke Street entrance to the mall in Barrow-in-Furness.
The form of the work is derived from the curved bow of the Vigilant, a Vanguard class nuclear submarine built in Barrow.
The intention of the work is to make it appear that the submarine has dropped onto the building. However, instead of demolishing it, the building has adjusted itself to accommodate the shape of the hull.
This work was been produced as part of FRED 2007 in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.
28 September - 14 October 2007.
It is also included in VELOCITY, a festival of digital art and culture stretching from Barrow to Lancaster run by Folly.
11 October - 3 November 2007.
The work was produced with financial support from Arts Council England.
Vigilance is a physical manifestation of data collected from the internet (the dimensions of the submarine) with the intention of creating a form with the appearance of mass and the possibility to cause displacement.
By Spencer Kelly @ BBC
‘As the flood of data across the internet continues to increase, there are those that say sometime soon it is going to collapse under its own weight. But that is what they said last year.’
read more...
net.weight is initiated and administrated by Rich Ehite.
Its purpose is to act as a sounding board for ideas about the internet as a sculptural entity.
Discussions could revolve around such topics as the size and mass of the internet, sculptural visualisations (literal, metaphorical etc...) and the sculptural methods used in creating net-based artworks.
