Max Cooper - Emptyset - Official video by Julius Horsthuis

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This video is part of the ‘One Hundred Billion Sparks’ project. Music and concept by Max Cooper, video by Julius Horsthuis
Max:
“Numbering things is an important building block for thought, without which our capacity for measurement and many other faculties are compromised. But in the early 1900’s mathematicians were troubled by what numbers were, in a pure sense, when there is nothing assigned to be counted. Mathematics and the tools of our thought couldn’t be based on oranges or lemons to which numbers are assigned. They solved the problem with the empty set, a list with nothing in it, from which all numbers could be built.

I find this idea interesting as it fits into the more general theme running throughout this project whereby the foundations of thought must be built, in a sense, from a vacuum. Meaning is created by opposition rather than inheritance (reciprocity), the capacity for logical processing can be an emergent property of simple systems (Rule 110), agency is emergent (Volition), identity is a morphing product of conditioning (Identity), and a basic of logical thought such as counting, is built from emptiness using sets (Emptyset).

This seeming lack of firm foundations is not restricted to this area however. If we look at the foundations of the objective world in the form of matter, we can keep zooming in to smaller and smaller sub-units. When we reach the “smallest” units we know of, physicists talk of point particles with zero size, which, are perfect replicas of one another, and only seem to exist in the sense of the informational relationships we deem them to embody. The familiar “stuff” of matter we’re comfortable with seems to have been replaced by ideas.

I love this groundlessness underneath so much of what is taken for granted. It’s not the sort of thing scientists will often talk about, as it’s speculative and perhaps not always practically productive. But it’s inspiring and fun to think about, which is all I’m really interested in. The music is mainly just an expression of my feelings during my month of isolated thoughts about my foundations, and an attempt to fit the musical form to the visual aesthetic aims I had for telling this story. It is the ideas which are the main product of the project.

Getting back to the chapter thread, counting is created from the void using the emptyset, a list, with no entries. This is assigned the number 0. Then there is some meta-trickery, where a new set is constructed which contains the emptyset as one of its entries (a set is just a list of contents), this is the number 1. 2 is then constructed as being a new set which contains both the previous sets for 0 and 1 – the emptyset plus theset containing the emptyset. 3 is then defined as the set containing all the sets for 0, 1 and 2, and so on to infinity.

I wanted to mirror this process of construction by iteration with a constant arpeggiated synth line throughout, a never-ending mechanism of creation, while the track plays. Julius Horsthius, applied fractal image generation to mirror the process visually, whereby simple structures repeat, grow and evolve to create something that looks like a pencil sketch of a real-world scene to me. We spoke a lot about how we could push the process outside of that of normal fractals, using lots of disorder and fine grained noise to try and get that balance between certain form, and chaos, which we see in nature and all around us.”

www.maxcooper.net
Julius:
“It was an honor to be creating this piece for Max Cooper, whom I’ve admired ever since I heard his music.

Max thought fractals where a good fit for his emptyset concept, but he didn’t want the fractals to be recognizable as such. Therefore, the usual aesthetics of the Mandelbulb3D software had to remain hidden. I experimented by creating some fractals that where extremely high in noise, and sometimes, interesting patterns start to appear in this noise, which I thought worked very effectively with the musical patterns evolving over time.
Fractals are fascinating because they often trigger in our minds familiarity and are a boost to the imagination.”

www.julius-horsthuis.com

Видео Max Cooper - Emptyset - Official video by Julius Horsthuis канала Max Cooper