ON HARMONIC ENTROPY

OCTOBER 21-24, 2024

Phyllis Gill Gallery, University of California Riverside

(WORKS LIST)

1. Solar Cycle 25, 2024.
Single-channel video, color, sound, 2:48 loop

2. Peratt Instabilities, 2024.
Single-channel video, black & white, 2:48 loop

3. Dead Apparatus, 2024.
Slide viewer, 35mm color slide, found image

4. Cold North Wind, 2024.
Slide viewer, 35mm color slide, found image

5. Trabes, Chasma, 2024.
Set of 5 four-color risograph prints, stained cradled panels

PRESS RELEASE

21 years ago, in October of 2003, the earth was struck by one of the largest solar storms in recorded history. Creating auroras visible throughout the majority of the United States, it temporarily disrupted satellite systems, created localized power outages, and compromised aircraft radio communications. My parents recall seeing pink waves of undulating light in the skies above Central Pennsylvania. I was in first grade, out trick-or-treating when it occurred. I try to conjure a mental image of the lights but I can only picture a dark skyline and the silhouette of half-barren trees. I remember nothing.

Transmission between two operators of the American Telegraph Line between Boston and Portland, Maine, during a severe geomagnetic storm on September 2, 1859:

Boston operator (to Portland operator): “Please cut off your battery [power source] entirely for fifteen minutes.”

Portland operator: “Will do so. It is now disconnected.”

Boston: “Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?”

Portland: “Better than with our batteries on. – Current comes and
goes gradually.”

Boston: “My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble.”

Portland: “Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?”

Boston: “Yes. Go ahead.”

Throughout antiquity, early civilization experienced a high degree of geomagnetic disturbance—solar flares produced intense auroral phenomena in the skies above, visible even to those in more southern regions. With their earliest documentation dating back to Cro-Magnon cave paintings, the northern lights spurred what was perhaps the first wave of pictorial communication.

Anthony Peratt, an American physicist, proposes that petroglyphs found internationally depict solar anomalies such as the aurora, often adhering to the same visual patterns created by magnetic energy contours and plasma currents. He also suggests that anthropomorphic “stick man” petroglyphs, prevalent globally, are actually “stylized derivations of a plasma discharge configuration seen in the ancient sky.“

As networked technologies such as the telegraph developed, disruptions in the electromagnetic field began to inflict havoc upon the communications industry. As referenced in the above anecdote between operators of the American Telegraph Line, in the mid-1800s, a particularly intense solar flare, referred to as the Carrington Event, caused a widespread interruption of telegraph service, destroying thousands of feet of cable due to magnetic disturbance, though oddly allowing some operators to continue transmissions without batteries; as their devices were powered by the auroral current.

Within the last century several geomagnetic storms have caused major power disruptions on earth. In August 1972, a major solar flare disrupted communication-grids across North America, prompting AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. The storm also caused the accidental detonation of dozens of American naval mines in Vietnam. In March 1989, a geomagnetic storm caused by a coronal mass ejection resulted in a nine-hour power outage in Quebec while simultaneously destroying several power transformers in New Jersey.

In Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, a cosmologist laments the potential downfall of networked communications, stating, “if there’s a solar flare, if you destroyed the information fabric of the world right now, modern civilization would collapse…If the Internet shuts down, people will not remember how they used to live before that.”

Solar activity is tracked in 11 year cycles, through which the sun experiences a cyclical minimum and maximum number of sunspots on its surface. As we progress through Solar Cycle 25 (which began in 2019) the earth is expected to experience an increased magnitude of solar flares, culminating with the most intense activity in the summer of 2025. Within the last month a severe G4 geomagnetic storm has allowed the northern lights to appear to the bare eye in skies as south as Alabama.

Geomagnetic storms bear a paradoxical relationship with human communication–both inciting and potentially dismantling the platforms we have developed to receive information. While our ancient counterparts inscribed images of solar eruptions, perhaps eventually our contemporary modes of communication may be lost to them.

As noted by Vilem Flusser in Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations:

“Human communication is the art of accumulating acquired information. Since the general tendency of nature is toward loss of information, human communication is therefore an antinatural process (artificial)...According to the second principle of thermodynamics, nature tends toward an ever-greater equilibrium, away from the improbable and toward increasing probability: it is an entropic process. Human communication tends toward ever-increasing information, away from the probable and toward increasing improbability: it is a negentropic process.”

Documentation by Brandon Bandy

©

Los Angeles, Calif.

Rachel Jackson