Ship of Theseus | Peter Macapia

19th June – 28th June 2009

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
Plutarch (Vita Thesei, 22-23)

For his first solo London exhibition, Ship of Theseus, Peter has designed an installation of sixteen intensely turbulent forms generated from geometrical and algorithmic processes. Suspended in mid-air, one can see each form radically change from one state to the next even though each “form” is exactly the same. Each one entails a shift of detail wherein another turbulent geometry which characterizes its surface is altered and replaced consecutively introducing one of the generative features of material behavior which is the conflict between form and pattern. Thus the paradox of the Ship of Theseus is reconstituted as another problem of identity and form.

The features of turbulence, geometry, and matter are characteristics of Peter’s work and research over the last seven years in which he has experimented with wax, fluids, smoke, dynamical computation and genetic algorithms. Ship of Theseus is not just about the paradox of identity, but also what that paradox introduces about identity, form, and matter. Theseus we remember had to navigate not only the turbulent sea but also the labyrinth. At the same time, the narrative of the paradox has a close kinship with the question of rule-based operations, emergence, and algorithms. If a geometrical process is replaced step-by-step with an algorithmic one, is it still a geometrical process. Peter’s work thus not only calls into question problems of form, identity, and matter, but also the identity of geometry in the age of the algorithm.
The exhibition will be accompanied with a video installation Atlas of Convection produced in collaboration with video artist Daniel Leeb.

Exhibition Photos