Hocus Pocus

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus, 51 seconds is longest lasting perpetual motion machine invented by his character, Elias Tarkington.

Sustainability is the search for a kind of perpetual motion machine.  In actuality, perpetual motion is not unachievable in a human time-frame given the continued combustion of the sun.  In fact, one could say, humans are a kind of perpetual motion of embodied information as genes are passed from one generation to the next. But for Vonnegut’s character, the perpetual motion machine only lasted 51 seconds.

Sustainability is the infinite play in conceptual, linguistic, and biological rot.  It is re-gathering of entropy for entropy re-lived.  Sustainability is fundamentally based within the reflexivity implicit in change.  We act out upon the world and change the world.  This changed world acts upon us.  Our experience and our decisions evolve in this reflexive environment. The world is finite, but expression is infinite in the multiple variants of the recycled materiality of existence.

Sustainability is just another way of talking about a quality of life we might want to aspire for so that we may live within the carrying capacity of the earth’s finite resources and that we give that quality of life to future generations.  Instead of feeling daunted by the ever-growing population and associated per capita consumption on a finite earth, this project aims to liberate the ideas of the 6.9 billion individuals within the context of capitalism to generate ideas not based on trends, advertisements, or fad fetishes, but rather innovations to make the things we truly need.  That our thoughts, actions, and needs become materially integrated for a more efficient overall system. jlw29Aug11