A Perfect Vacuum

During my Research into John Cage, I have been doing for my dissertation about the role chance has played in the development of art, I discovered the author Stanislaw Lem. This book ‘A perfect Vacuum’ is the collection of reviews the author has written on imaginary books, the story that was of particular interest to me was ‘De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi’ in which the imaginary author of the story being reviewed details all the happenings that led to his birth by tracing the situations in which his ancestors met as well as the causes behind these back into time, coming to the conclusion that according to laws of probability he should not exist. The point is being made that before events occur the probability of all these things happening in succession to produce the birth of the author are close to zero, they have however happened in this way. Lem is therefore illustrating what he sees as a failure of probability theory, the fact that improbable events occur everyday and that in fact most events that have happened would have been considered improbable before they occurred. This story has provoked a lot of thought for me, in particular they way the author suggests people exists of there own worldlines, this is a quote explaining this notion from the essay which provided the reference for me:

‘Chance, the narrator suggests is the intersection of independent causal chains. Each is deterministic on its own, but the intersections create unthinkable complexity and inevitable unpredictability. In this view, the world comes into existence as threads of independent worldlines a term describing how subatomic particles move through spacetime -- whose intersections create the warp and woof of the universe.’ Katherine Hayles, Chance Operations: Cagean Paradox and Contemporary Science.

I am working on ways to represent these ideas in the form of screen prints with different layers showing the causal wordlines of objects.