Breathing Brick (2021)
Live simulation streamed on Youtube Live with chat enabled
Breathing Brick is a live-streamed simulation commissioned for the second annual Sustainable Enterprise London Festival. The festival ran 12th – 23rd July 2021 and Breathing Brick ran on YouTube Live for the latter half.
I wrote about how the piece responded to the festival theme 'A New Different' and began a new investigation into holes in my practice.
. . . . .
I’m not sure how to feel about holes. Sometimes they’re a deficiency, a lack, a shortage, a disconnection, a wound. Sometimes they’re the goal. They’re an opportunity, a passage, a connection.
And sometimes they’re both. In the mathematical field of topology, something with a hole, like a donut, is fundamentally different to something without a hole, like a dinner plate. No matter how much you pull and stretch and shrink that donut, it can never be a true dinner plate. It will always have a hole. But if you stretch and bend the donut, it can become a record, a drinking straw, or a mug with a handle.
The last year bore a hole in me.
On one hand I feel an urgent need to fill it. Like the good little dutch boy who risked his life to plug the dike so life could get back to normal. But I also think that those mathematicians might be right in saying that this experience has fundamentally changed me. I want to use this opportunity to explore this new hole in my life. Can it be filled by getting back into my old practice–live computer simulation?
Or is it time to accept that I’m now a donut?