One day last week, after an intense and sometimes emotional time sorting through files and papers and deciding what to keep, what to shred, and what to send to my archived papers, I decided to take a while and visit an art installation at the Park Avenue Armory. “Clinamen,” by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. I walked into the vast space of the Armory, astonished to find it so quiet. Repeat: quiet. This is New York. Park Avenue.
The installation is on a large platform, with three large aqua pools of water and, overhead, a large circular light shedding a gentle, diffused light that makes the whole place gleam. In the pools of water, float dozens of ceramic bowls, all an unobtrusive matte taupe color, different heights, different circumferences, different thicknesses, all drifting. Soft, silent jets of water keep the bowls moving and clinking against one another. Random but not random. Each sound distinctive but not jarring.
The expansive room is surrounded by angular, continuous, smooth wooden seating several feet from the ponds–except that a good quarter or a third of the people on these low platforms are lying down, some in fetal position, some on their backs, or they are sitting on the floor and with their back against the bench, legs folded in lotus position or spread straight out. On the wooden floor (smooth light wood again), some people stand, some stroll, others sit, some move very close to one of the pools, some stay at a middle distance between the pools. A few people lie near the pools, their head or forehead practically touching the water.
The silence, except for the delicious clinking, was the first surprise.
The orderliness was what I noticed next.
There must have been one or two hundred people when I visited, hard to estimate numbers in such a cavernous space. There were no rules, no prescribed seating, no directions. A woman in a discreet Armory uniform walked softly around the space, well practiced at minimizing her authority, understating herself. In this, she resembled the “audience,” if that is the right name for all of us together in that echoing auditorium, sharing something unexpected.
The people at “Clinamen” were as beautiful as the pools, as the floating bowls, as the soft, ceramic tinkle.
I only learned what the word “clinamen” means after I returned home. From Wikipedia: “Clinamen (/klaɪˈneɪmən/; plural clinamina, derived from clinare, to incline) is the unpredictable swerve of atoms in the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus. This swerving, according to Lucretius, provides the “free will which living things throughout the world have”.[1] Lucretius never gives the primary cause of the deflections.“
Perfect. That afternoon, after a soul-wrenching morning, I felt “deflected.” In the best possible way.
When I read the hype about GenAI, about how it is superhuman and getting more and more and more and more superhuman every day, I think about the experience–the alive, collective, very human experience–of being in the Armory with other people on a very hot day. I had assumed most of the visitors would be middle-aged or older–I mean, who has time to spend watching and listening to bowls swerving gently unpredictably? But I was wrong. The ages ranged from infants in strollers to the very elderly, including people of all ages in wheel chairs or with walkers or canes, all genders, all human “types” (to use a terrible word)–artistic people in avant-garde clothing with impressive piercings and tattoos and multi-colored hair, stereotypical Upper East side elites, tourists, business people, mothers and nannies with babies, school kids, college students. Lots of traditional college-age students. Some tourists, of course. All races, too.
Most people had cell phones and almost everyone took a selfie or two (including moi!). But then the cell phones seemed, one by one, to disappear, as if it were a sacrilege to spend time in this space scrolling or texting. We all sat together, eyes open, eyes closed, almost no one talking. Even the babies went silent.
The admission at the Park Avenue Armory is $30. Not free but also not as costly as many events in America’s most expensive city–not even as much as the proverbial Starbucks coffee and pastry. And you can stay all day. When I entered, the guard advised me to get my arm stamped so I could return. “We’re open until 8,” he said. It was about 2 pm. “If you have a stamp, you can come back in any time today, as many times as you want.” “But who does that?” I asked. He smiled, “Almost everyone. People leave but they can’t stay away. They return.”
I left. Did some errands. And, yes, I returned. Stealing a few precious moments, before an appointment.
Later in the day, there were more people who seemed to have come directly from work, in office clothes. As I left the second time, at the entrance I said to two women who, I assumed, had stopped by after a day at work: “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” One of the women answered, her voice soft and low: “Yes. It’s our third time.”
When I read the hype about GenAI, about how it is superhuman and getting more and more and more and more superhuman every day, I think about the experience–the alive, human, collective, quite, orderly and unorganized experience–of being in the Armory with other people on a very hot day. No prompt required. No slick, AI summary answer. No quick fix. Problems solved!
The experience remains long after I exited. Ambient. Human. Visceral. Sight. Sound. Smell. Touch. When I reflect on the experience, I can almost taste it.
I think about ways that, as a teacher, I can offer my students “Ambient Intelligence,” the insights not on the syllabus, that come from sheer, personal interaction, from what is not assigned, not prescribed, not prompted. Maybe today we need to take a walk together. Maybe today we need to get out notebooks and pens and do some silent, collective writing. Certainly in this GenAI time, we need more opportunities where our institutional structures offer us “clinamen.”
In Tale of a Tub (1704), the wicked, cynical satirist Jonathan Swift waxes poetic. He writes, as quoted in Wikipedia: “Epicurus modestly hoped that one time or other, a certain fortuitous concourse of all men’s opinions—after perpetual justlings, the sharp with the smooth, the light and the heavy, the round and the square—would, by certain clinamina, unite in the notions of atoms and void, as these did in the originals of all things.”
After perpetual justlings, the sharp with the smooth. Clinamina.
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A few days after I visited, the New York Times wrote about the exhibit (I think the reporter may have been there the same day I was, in fact). For more in-depth reporting, I recommend “The Best Seat in the House Is No Seat at All” by Alexis Soloski.
PHOTO CREDIT: Selfie by myself.