THE BLACK BEAM
The image of the black beam regularly appears to me, jutting out from mountain peaks, from the tops of trees, from within the earth, in dreams, and at dusk. It stops by to remind me of the possibility of an underlying order to chaos and mystery, most recently while re-watching 2001: A Space Odyssey where it occurs as a mysterious monolith that marks, or perhaps sparks, periods of rapid evolution.
Having recently spent much time exploring the physics of color, my understanding of the black beam as a metaphoric portal between the known and the unknown has evolved.
A perfect black is said to absorb all wavelengths of visible light, but what becomes of that light? I want to imagine the black object behaves like a sponge, absorbing light until it reaches some saturation point where it cannot possibly take another photon, and then, in an explosive instant, it becomes shockingly reflective, a river of excess light pouring off.
But this, of course, is not the case. The photons are converted to kinetic energy in the molecular bonds of the black material and escape in a form that defies the limitations of our perception. The material blackness is the physical threshold between the concrete, observable world and the abstract, theoretical world which we see only with our internal eye.
In this infinite unknown just beyond the threshold, we explore with our minds that which does not yet exist, unconstrained by the limits of the physical world. This is the path of the black beam.
My belief in the power of the arts as a crucible of social and technical innovation stems from this position, as the arts inherently operate at the boundary between the known and unknown. The black beam is the portal and the path and the space in which we dig around to pull new forms from the void.
As the explosion of information and connectivity increasingly reminds us how very little we know about the complex systems we inhabit, and how very little influence we can exert upon them, our skillful navigation of the unknown, walking through and along and inside of the black beam, becomes the ultimate adaptive capacity.
