Dissipative Figures - Murmuration
Dissipative Figures - Murmuration
A murmuration is not depicted by the contours of individual birds.
When birds fly, the surrounding environment, such as the air, also moves due to the flapping of their wings and the movement of their bodies. As long as birds live, they continuously dissipate energy into the world and keep moving the surrounding environment. This artwork does not depict the material surface boundary of the bird itself, but depicts the existence of the murmuration through the energy that the murmuration continues to give to the world and the resulting movement of the environment.
A murmuration is not an accumulation of individual birds, but a giant, organic phenomenon of collective flight. The birds rise up in the space like a single large entity, while mutually changing their distance, direction, and speed from each other. The contours of its existence are not the surface boundary of individual birds' bodies. It is something ambiguous that includes the bodies of the birds, the flow of air that is continuous with them, and the energy dissipated into the surroundings.
When viewers pass in front of the artwork, the viewers themselves also move the surrounding environment. This movement occurs in the same space as the space where the depicted murmuration is. The movement of the murmuration and the movement of the viewer blend together within the same flow of energy, and the lines that depict the murmuration are disrupted and change due to the movement of the viewer.
This painting is not an image for looking at the murmuration from the outside. It becomes a continuous field where the depicted murmuration and the viewer exist within the same environment. The murmuration is not a closed existence on the other side of the screen, but changes its appearance while blending with the environment moved by the viewer's body.
Objects like stones continue to exist even if placed in a closed box, sealed off from the outside world. But life cannot maintain its existence in such a closed box. Life consumes external matter and energy as food and discharges it, maintaining its structure as the energy dissipates.
Life is like a vortex created in the ocean, an existence within a flow, and the boundaries of its existence are ambiguous, an existence within an infinite continuity.
A murmuration is also an existence that emerges within a flow. Through the continuity of individual birds' bodies, the movement of air, the dissipated energy, the viewer's body, and the surrounding environment, a giant phenomenon of a murmuration is born.
To be alive is to constantly dissipate energy into the world and to be an open existence, continuous with the world.