Opening: Maarten Van Roy / Oracle

Maarten Van Roy
ORACLE

Opening June 29 / 7pm
2018 June 30 – August 3

Design does not need an active, interfering designer. It’s an inherent part of the universe. One of the things that makes people so uncomfortable about this idea of, if you will, spontaneous pattern formation, is that somehow or other you don’t need a creator. But perhaps a really clever designer, what he would do, is to kind of treat the universe like a giant simulation, where you set some initial condition and just let the whole thing spontaneously happen in all of its wonder and all of its beauty. The mathematics of pattern formation shows that the same kind of pattern can show up in an enormous range of different physical, chemical, biological systems. Somewhere deep down inside, it’s happening for the same mathematical reason. Implicit in those facts are these beautiful patterns that we see everywhere. All the complexity of the universe, all its infinite richness, emerges from mindless simple rules, repeated over and over again. Powerful though this process is, it’s also inherently unpredictable. So although I can confidently tell you that the future will be amazing, I can also say, with scientific certainty, that I have no idea what it holds.

Jim Al-Khalili, The Secret Life of Chaos