Blackboards

Waiting Rooms

Prayer Schematics

Praying is talking/communicating into a great precipice, into the unknown, like a sonar bouncing off the abyssal planes of the ocean.  To wish for something is to make a transmission that emanates from one’s being.

I did a translation exercise with my father, who is a computer programmer and a practitioner in the language of math and physics.  I wrote a brief narrative that suggested how prayer operates.  He translated the concepts outlined in my story into a few physics expressions for me to use in my studio.  A particular equation came out of this exercise: The Helmholtz Boundary Integral equation.  It is used to do theoretical studies of the echoed response that sonar produces. 

Sonar produces a sound that is projected in a particular direction where it finally bounces off an “elastic object”.  The term elastic refers to how the object vibrates in reaction to the sonar’s sound waves.  The vibrations themselves radiate energy back. It’s the energy from the return vibrations that are calculated using the Helmholtz equation. 

I have become enamored with this equation.  I wrote it over and over on small, handmade blackboards, eventually becoming my two series, Waiting Rooms and Prayer Schematics