Saeed Gebaan
ENTROPY
2022 Kinetic Installation Presented in Find Me Through the Fog Exhibition — Visual Arts Commission , Abha and Riyadh Curated by Maryam Bilal Images courtesy of the Visual Arts Commission Photography: Mohammed Iskandarani
STATEMENT
Black chains hang from twenty-four motors, and fall. Their links are bound to one another, turning in a closed circuit with no way out the very shape of energy's transformation. They strike the floor and do not settle; they twist upward into coils no motor can repeat. The white ones dissolve into the white of the space until they all but vanish from the eye yet not from the ear: they are what sustains the sound of rain.
What remains visible is only the black: energy, turning.
Then the sound arrives. The chains meeting the floor sound like rain.
The black is heat. It is the force that made life possible on this planet and no other not because it exists, for other planets have it too, but because here it fell within the narrow range that life allows. When it leaves that range it does not become another force; it remains itself, and burns.
Every tree that burned in Asir was sunlight gathered across years and held fast in its wood. Wood is solar energy in the form of matter. The fire created nothing; it released what had been held years of light set loose in hours. What changed was not the kind of energy, but the time in which it left. Catastrophe is acceleration, not difference.
And the rain that put out that fire was a child of heat as well: the sun drew the water up, the vapor rose, condensed, and fell. Nature was not rescued from outside itself. It extinguished itself with the very force that had burned it.
So the chains do not explain this cycle. They perform it. They descend by gravity, storing in their descent the energy of their height; and when they reach the floor, all of it is released in a single instant — order collapses, the chain twists upward, and from its striking the sound of rain is born. Collapse and healing are not two events in sequence, but one event occurring at once.
Entropy is not collapse in a direction. It is interweaving. And renewal lives nowhere else.
THE WORK
Twenty-four motors are suspended from the ceiling, each lowering a plastic chain and drawing it back in a continuous cycle.
The chain descends straight under its own weight. When it reaches the floor it stops descending but does not stop moving: the motor pushes from above while the floor prevents it from continuing, and it folds into itself in rising coils.
One motor, one motion, and a result that never repeats. A tenth of a millimeter in the chain's position is enough for the coil to come out different.
Half the chains are black, half white. The white ones read poorly against the white wall and all but disappear but their absence is only visual: they are what carries the sound and keeps it continuous. The black is seen; the white is heard.
And with each strike, a sound. Together, all twenty-four, they are heard not as metallic clatter but as rain falling on a surface.
SPATIAL EXPERIENCE
The visitor enters a white room where chains hang from ceiling to floor.
From a distance it appears ordered: parallel rows, a repeating motion. As one moves closer, the order comes apart. No two chains coil alike, and no coil returns twice.
The visitor can walk among them. Nothing bars the way, and the chains move close to the body. Standing at the center of the room, the sound arrives from every direction.
The space keeps working whether anyone stands in it or not.
DEVELOPMENT
The chain was not only a choice of material but of form. Closed links, joined, turning without end the very shape of the cycle the work runs on. I did not want to symbolize the transfer of energy; I wanted the moving body itself to be a closed circuit.
The engineering question seemed simple: how do I make a machine produce a result it cannot repeat?
I calibrated the height of the motors, the speed of rotation, and the length of each chain until I reached the point where the chain meets the floor without heaping, and coils without tangling. The margin between the two is narrow, and settling it took many prototypes.
I did not program the coils. They cannot be programmed. The motor repeats its motion precisely, and gravity and the floor do the rest. This is exactly what I wanted: a system exact at the input, and a result no one owns at the output.
CLOSING STATEMENT
We assume nature needs saving. It puts out its fire with the same hand that lit it.
The force does not change. Only the range changes. And all of life stands within that narrow range.
MATERIALS
· Plastic Chains (Black and White) · 24 Motors · Pulley System · Custom Electronic Control System · Suspended Structure · Sound Generated by the Work (Unamplified) · Dimensions Variable