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"Device for Harnessing the Creativitie" -- link to Devices Gallery
The Manner of Holding the Device for
Harnessing the Creativitie

   I remember reading a few years ago a claim made by the physicist Stephen Hawking that we appeared to be on the verge of finding a "Theory of Everything" which would relate all of the fundamental forces of nature as different aspects of the same meta-force.

   "Oh, happy day!" I thought. Surely this Theory of Everything (TOE) will spawn new technologies that, for instance, might allow me to harness the illusive and fickle force of creativity upon which we artists depend so heavily. This possibility inspired my Devices Series of paintings, musings on how the TOE technologies will benefit the ordinary person. At the same time I did a little research and was disturbed to find that:

  • Hawking's claim was made back in 1979, and TOE-dom has yet to be achieved.
  • Similar claims were made at the end of the 19th century, just before the orderliness of classical physics degenerated into warped and twisted spaces, uncertain outcomes, and 26-dimensional fundamental-building-blocks-o'-matter candidates, those peculiar wriggling strings ("quantum maggots" as I envision them, gnawing away at a sane reality).
  • Creativity is not considered a fundamental force of nature.
  • Apparently the "everything" in "Theory of Everything" is only a small subset of EVERYTHING. If indeed we are on the verge of finding a TOE, it is just a little toe. The Big TOE is still out of reach.

   Feeling greatly disillusioned by the slow progress and limited scope of the modern high priests, I decided to embark on my own search for the TOE. And while the search is far from over, I have recently stumbled upon a close relative of the TOE: the FINGER - or more accurately, the five-finger ensemble. Furthermore, I suspect that this ensemble might just be the biggest obstacle to finding the TOE.

   At the risk of being excommunicated from the human race, I posit that we have been led astray by our hands, that the chirocentric paradigm will carry us no further. The hand defines the human being to a disturbingly large extent; the modern human in particular is distrustful of anything that cannot be "grasped" directly, or at least quantified ("digits" come in handy here). The hand is our meta-tool, parent of all other tools, manipulator of the physical environment and shaper of our reality. It has worked its way so insidiously into our psyches that our cosmologists get downright sweaty when confronted by those things that are outside the domain of the hand. I believe that this is why the TOE keeps slipping through our collective fingers, through the widening cracks in our current cosmological models. The hand is, quite possibly, the Anti-TOE.

-Marc Silva, Fall 1997