Experience
13 02 88
The piece takes a birth date and refuses to treat it as a number. February 13, 1988 enters the work as three frequencies rather than three digits.
Thirteen sets the winding number, the structural loops that give the form its skeleton.
Two governs the macro rotation and the pair of strands.
Eighty-eight drives the micro-oscillation, the shimmer riding the surface at a density the eye reads as texture instead of count.
The result is a (2, 13) torus knot: a single closed curve that never crosses itself, though it looks like a crowd. It is one line the entire time. The 4D fold applied to each vertex means the structure periodically turns inside out and returns, so the form has no stable outside and no reliable center.
It listens.
The knot swells at the low end, sharpens with the highs, and quickens with volume. Nothing happens without a room around it. The work is not a picture of a self, it is a self that only exists while something is being said near it.
Most of all, it forgets. Only the last seconds survive on screen. Everything older is not faded, not archived, not made faint. It is gone. The piece cannot accumulate a past, which is the only honest thing a self-portrait can do.
A date is usually offered as proof that a person began. Here it is offered as a set of instructions, running continuously, producing something that will never repeat and cannot be recovered.
amirpiloo
