Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes,” 2015

Flat screen, Kinect, computer, custom-made software
Dimensions variable, 85" screen
Edition of 1
In "Airborne 6" (2015), quotes from the book "Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes," written in 1955 by Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, gradually appear on a flat screen on a black background. As a viewer stands in front of the work a sensor detects his or her presence and renders the letters of the text “airborne,” generating turbulent movements. The letters accumulate slowly until the screen shows tens of thousands of letters, at which point the text fades out and begins to scroll, again from the beginning. This is the sixth piece of a series of interactive installations designed to animate literary, scientific, and philosophical texts on the subjects of complexity and non-linear dynamics, which “read” the public and react to their presence. The work of Prigogine famously defined “dissipative structure theory,” key to the understanding of self- organizing systems that could reverse the maximization of entropy rule imposed by the second law of thermodynamics.