Untitled (Model)

2023
2x plastic discs, 1x roll of tape, 3x steel folder fixings, 6x elastic bands, 1x piece of polystyrene, 2x pieces of foam, 1x steel rod, 1x wooden dowel, 4x coils of soft metal, 1x steel mesh, 2x pieces of foam board, 2x plastic rods, various pieces of Plasticine, a length of string, 1x paper label, 1x roll of ModRoc, 1x plastic packaging, 1x cork, 1x Uhu glue and box. Plus Copydex glue and acrylic paint. Placed on square wooden base, with a small figurine of a man.

In our infinite universe everything eventually decays and returns to fundamental particles, and could probably, one day return to a previous state*. What if we helped some items on this journey, and imagined their new states of being? One day, all the components that make up this artwork could exist again as they once did.

*‘Infinity is big! Could we somehow get a glimpse into something that is truly infinite? What would happen to a physical system if we wait an infinite amount of time? Imagine we take a box – nothing can come in or out. Put an apple in the box and close it. Come back in a month, the apple might look decayed – In a year, the apple has rotted. In a hundred years, the apple is probably dust. The apple contains chemical energy. That energy will eventually come out, so the apple inside the box will get very hot, thousands of degrees. Those particles will start to nuclear fuse together. The apple, eventually, turns into fundamental particles. Billions of years later, neutrons will decay into protons and other fundamental particles, and then it will sit there for a very long time. How do the particles experience this? There is a finite number of the states that these particles can be in. The contents of the box will go through every state that it can, eventually having to reuse states that it’s been in before. At some point if you open the box, the apple will be there again. Every possible thing that could exist in the box will exist. And it will each exist an infinite number of times. Why do we care? Well, we might be in the box.’
– Edited narration by Anthony Aguirre, Theoretical cosmologist, A Trip To Infinity – Netflix, 2022.