Chance and Necessity

“Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.”
Democritus

How can we think objective scientific knowledge and the ethical values of traditional philosophy together? Chance and Necessity, the exhibition by Kerem Ozan Bayraktar and Sergen Şehitoğlu at Sanatorium from 19 April to 20 May 2018, takes its title from a book by Jacques Monod that starts from this question. The title of Monod’s important 1970 book was in turn inspired by Democritus, the ancient Greek philosopher who put forward the theory of atoms. In the book, Monod describes belief systems that contradict scientific knowledge as one of the most important problems of the age, and challenges Plato, Hegel and even Marx. According to this scientific thinking, the universe was not designed for human beings. Yet both philosophy-based value systems and spiritual values place the human at the centre of the universe and try to give human life a meaning. Chance points to situations that cannot be foreseen, necessity to the forming of suitable conditions. In the works they produced for the exhibition, Bayraktar and Şehitoğlu explore the points where scientific knowledge touches a human-centred way of thinking.

Kerem Ozan Bayraktar’s series Some of the Potentially Uninhabitable Planets consists of planets that cannot in fact be lived on but are presented in the media as “a new Earth”. The series of thirteen planets reflects a human-centred way of thinking and underlines that scientific knowledge is somehow tied to the human in order to count as important. In 2013, for example, the discovery by the Kepler telescope, known as the “planet hunter”, of planets outside the Solar System thought possibly to have conditions for life was reported in the media as exciting news. The likelihood of life on these planets, thought to hold water or an atmosphere, is very low. Announced with headlines such as “The astronomy world is excited about a new star system and Earth-like planets discovered by the Kepler telescope”, this research matters more for the development of scientific knowledge than for the possibility of life beyond Earth.

Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Some of the Potentially Uninhabitable Planets, 2018

Emergence, the coherent structures or patterns that arise from interactions in complex systems where low- and high-probability states coexist, points to the unexpected results of chance interactions. The possibility of life on these planets likewise rests on the potential results of interactions that could happen by chance. Bayraktar’s series includes six planets discovered by the Kepler telescope. Shown at the size of an encyclopaedia page, these depictions of planets set up an objective language through their flawless visuals and their sections of detailed information about each planet.

With his installation Mojave Desert, Sergen Şehitoğlu reconstructs the Mojave Desert in California on the gallery wall. Studying the desert on Google Earth, Şehitoğlu makes a list of the areas where human impact can be felt. This list of coordinates, the Mojave Desert Information Plate, is shown as an aluminium plate. The bird’s-eye views of these coordinates, taken from satellite images, carry signs that reveal human impact. Through these images, placed on the wall to scale, the extent of human impact on the desert stands out. By leaving out the rest of the desert, this fragmented installation points to the human-centred way of thinking that Bayraktar also takes up. The Anthropocene, a concept much discussed recently, is the name given to the geological epoch the Earth has been in for roughly the last three hundred years. Focusing on the Anthropocene, which marks the point at which human impact on the Earth reaches a geologically significant scale, the artist also makes visible the likeness between the forms that the processing of matter and energy needed for life spreads into the environment, and other human-made objects.

Dust Devils, the animation Kerem Ozan Bayraktar and Sergen Şehitoğlu made together, is about the small dust storms that form in the desert. Starting from the concept of emergence, the video takes as its subject the way chance interactions bring out new forms that cannot be predicted.

The exhibition was shaped by a reading and research group that Bayraktar and Şehitoğlu run together. This research is strongly felt both in the video the two artists made together and in their own works. One of the sources that shaped their research is Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form, published in 1969. An important mathematical source on the emergence of the universe, the book also stands close to systems theory, which, drawing on the theories of Wittgenstein, who worked on language and logic, and of the psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, treats different formations as a whole from a non-essentialist point of view. Addy Pross’s What is Life? is another source the artists draw on. Published in 2012, Pross’s book starts from Schrödinger’s 1944 book of the same name. After Schrödinger, known for his work in quantum physics, who took up the problems of genetics from the perspective of physics and, like Jacques Monod, explored the relation of science to philosophy and ethics, Addy Pross returns to the questions “What is life, how did it begin and how should it be defined?”

The mind map in the exhibition brochure, which reflects their research process, holds the references behind the works and makes it very easy to follow the connections the two artists made. As the map shows, in low-probability habitats, under suitable conditions, “things that do work and multiply” come together as temporary islands. As in biology, these temporary islands copy their own order. The low-probability states we call ordered can, over time, evolve into high-probability states once unforeseeable (chance) suitable conditions arise (necessity). Taken as a whole, the exhibition uses the concepts of chance and necessity to trace a cycle that leads, if there were life on the planets Bayraktar presents as potential habitats, to the Anthropocene impact Şehitoğlu studies, and shows that what looks like a potential utopia is in fact closer to a dystopia.

All photographs courtesy of Sanatorium. Machine translation from the Turkish.