The sculpture is composed of three main elements:

• A vortex -- designed by the artist in Mathematica
• A human figure -- figure shown is off-the shelf (CyberWare Labs)
  -- Will need to either license from CyberWare or do an original design.
• An electrical plasma emanating from the figure -- (thus the bell jar)

• Time -- riding a wave of The Present, being pushed toward the Future;
• The predicted Moore's Law Singularity event.

• The cosmological singularity at a black hole;
• A tornado -- the Storm of Progress.

"History is an Angel being blown
Backward
Into the Future;

History is a pile of debris;

And the Angel wants to go back
And fix things;
To repair the things that have been broken.

But there's a storm
Blowing
>From Paradise;

And the storm keeps blowing the Angel
Backward
Into the Future.

And this storm,
This storm
Is called
Progress."

   -- Laurie Anderson, "Hansel & Gretel (For Walter Benjamin)"
      "Strange Angels", 1989

As I understand and interpret the Singularity event, either one of two possible outcomes will occur:

• Our social institutions will collapse catastrophically, global destruction of the environment will occur and what remains will be reduced to some primitive, pre-historic state;
• Or, we will achieve a state of Grace, in which we will have learned how to control all the complexities we have created in our techno-economic systems.

The sculpture also speculates on the human condition on the other side of the singularity.

How are we to achieve this state of grace? -- In which our tools are so human-friendly, that we have this omniscient control over them? -- That we can live so harmoniously with them that we can be virtually free of them? Will we have physically modified ourselves to achieve this? In what way will we be modified?

I propose that we will be somehow tuned into the complexity of the quantum continuum itself. (See Roger Penrose' Computational Quantum Graviton (CQG) Theory, "The Emperor's New Mind", Oxford University Press)

Therefore, I propose that the figure in the sculpture will be encased in a bell jar and the figure will act as the cathode conductor element for a plasma display, after the work of Bill Parker, Guy Marsden and others.

The visual energy in the plasma radiating from the figure, will signify this angelic state we will have achieved after the singularity.

(c) Copyright 1999 Stewart Dickson