ENTROPY#

When I am facing a landscape, I cannot help myself wondering which parts are shaped by past man’s activities. Sometime you can distinguish obvious shapes which are definitely Manmade. Don’t you wonder what it was like before? If you are just like me this is what you would do. Today, it is jolly hard work to find a piece of landscape free from human intervention. Landscapes have always been the centre point of many human activities – Man lives, works, exploits natural resources, spends some leisure time or simply passes by landscapes. He does not just seats there and looks at the full extent of the beauty given to him by Mother Nature.

It is the remaining traces I am interested in - an oddly shaped bump, an inappropriately placed flat surface or a simple hole in the ground. It makes my mind wonder, it tells me stories. I believe we all do the same when we visit an archaeological site or historical building. We try to imagine what it was like. How it could have been? We start telling ourselves stories.

It can be very difficult to differentiate manufactured artifacts to ones resulting from natural processes. In Archaeology, entropy measures the relative absence or decrease of organization. According to Claude E. Shannon’s theory of information, less organisation means less information. High entropy signifies a decrease in information or a high probability of uncertainty. Artifacts are characterized by an increase of information and therefore a lower measure of entropy. To some extent, we mentally do a measure of entropy when evolving in an environment. This is how we can identify natural parts of a landscape from the ones originating from man’s activities. In archaeology, entropy measures allow to form theories on a site history. It will tell stories about past events.

The Entropy Project is all about those stories you will tell yourself...

Entropy#1 - 2013

Scaled model

Project size : 260 x 540 x 540 cm

Entropy#2 - 2013

3D model & Sketches

Project size : 230 x 600 x 800 cm

The title, the subtitle and the story behind them

I usually give a second title to my work – more like a subtitle. I rarely give it away. I strongly believe it is up to the person to have its own interpretation. My titles are indications, directions on how the work should be looked at – never do they give a signification. I find it too restrictive to tell people what they are looking at as they might see something very different and more interesting. My subtitles are very personal, it is between my work and myself. They are directly linked to the thought process behind a piece and its construction.

As the Entropy# project is all about the stories in our head triggered by what is presented to us, I would like to share my story concerning the work Entropy#2. Its subtitle, my subtitle to be accurate, is Narcissus, from the Greek mythology. The starting point in my mind was a pond, a man made pond, I came across during one of my many walks through the Gers (France) countryside next to where I used to live. On the side of the pond is a big rock half covered by the roots of a tortuous tree. The rock looks over the pond and makes it a perfect scene. This image reminded me of Narcisse changé en fleur/Narcissus turned into a flower [1771] by the French painter Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié [1735–1784] and Echo and Narcissus [1903] by the british painter John William Waterhouse [1849-1917]. I could image that in the past a shepherd would bring his herd to the pond and look at its reflection on the water surface.

The piece Entropy#2 has a specific construct. You have to imagine an axis going through the middle of the rock and the big pond (the convex shape and the elongated concave one or if you rather, the bump and the hole). It splits in half the installation. Each halves are the reflection of the other one. The small ponds on each sides mark the symmetry.

Entropy#3 - 2013

Preparatory sketch

Project size : 60 x 720 x 800 cm