Entropy 2020 Meredith Miller
Hot gases rise. Ice melts at 32°F. If I fill my coffee mug with boiling water first, and allow heat to transfer from the water to the thermal mass of the ceramic walls, then my coffee will cool off more slowly. Predictable patterns of thermal behavior provide the basis for so much of our daily functioning. At this precarious moment in human history (pre-election, mid-pandemic, full-swing-anthropocene), some may find reassurance in the constancy of thermodynamics…. I do.
Left, the raw materials necessary for a 10 brick batch: soy-wax, gravel aggregate, lavender essential oil, and aquamarine dye chunks.
On my shelf sits a small but surprisingly heavy object made of light-green tinted wax and dark stone aggregate. Its squared edges and brick-like proportions lend it a similar range of affordances as that of a brick. One could stack up with others into a wall. Or sail through a pane of plate glass. To me, though, this brick says less of what it “wants to be” and more of the thermodynamic conditions of its making. This side of its story features two stockpiles of different materials (wax and stones), the environment in which they came to mingle, and an influx of enough energy to assert a higher degree of order, if only temporarily. I say temporarily because we know from the second law of thermodynamics that closed Entropy 2020
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