Event Two | MNEMOAWARI

I went to E. Joteva's solo exhibition MNEMOAWARI this Tuesday (http://m.dma.ucla.edu/events/?ID=1007). Actually I was quite confused at first. There are so many people wandering around, talking and taking pictures, which made me ironically feel that "people" was the topic of this exhibition, instead of those melting snow balls or ice balls. They are quite artistic indeed, but what's their meaning?

Drip

Water dripped down from one huge ice ball to the basin under it. A beam of light projected the ripples in the basin to the wall. Ice balls with petals and leaves in them rotated slowly on the wall. Their characteristic of a sphere reminded me planets and life. Everything is dying. From the buds embedded in the ice balls to the ice balls themselves, from the plants grown on the Earth to the Earth itself, energy was drained gradually.

Buds Embedded

One concept in physics is entropy. "The second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated system's entropy never decreases. Such systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy. Non-isolated systems may lose entropy, provided their environment's entropy increases by at least that amount." This is an excerpt from the definition of entropy in Wikipedia. The ice balls would become smaller and smaller. So what was lost? Ice became water, but it was more than that. It also counteracted the heat coming from the environment. It was a transformation from substances that could be seen and touched to something more abstract. But if we calmed down and felt it, we could sense this process. We saw the passage of time by noticing the drips and ripples. We saw the exchange of energy by finding the balls get smaller. Maybe I should not use "saw". It is a kind of awareness that relates humans to other things sharing this world with us.

Why Sphere?

Ice Balls or Planets?

Through the event does not have obvious connections with any topics we have covered before, it actually includes everything. Why did E. Joteva use sphere as a symbol, instead of a cube or a cone? Maybe it's because spheres indicate something perfect, something fair, since every dot on a sphere has the same distance from the center of the sphere. The extinction of energy is the same to every dot on the sphere. How is entropy related to science and technology? It is an exchange between the substance and the intangible. Moreover, I believe the exhibition also reveals some elements of neuroscience or cognitive science. Of course, art is always associated with the perception of its audience. This event is a great combination of art, nature and science. I never regret that I went to this exhibition. But if it is still open, I will choose a day that there are not so many people.

Selfies

Reference:

"Entropy." Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy. Accessed 11 May 2017.