Chris Helson and Sarah Jackets’ Maxwell’s Demon is part archive and part ‘son et lumière’. Son et Lumière, the originally French practice of site-specific sound and light shows, was traditionally focused on conjuring the history of a place. At the culmination of a year long process of immersion in the stories, landscape, histories, local economy and politics of the Glenkens, Helson and Jackets have made a four day ‘son et lumière’ performance - installation in the new theatre space of the CatStrand centre.At its centre was a small luminous three-dimensional spectre of no apparent material substance.



A tall transparent cylinder surrounds this topological phantasm lest a viewer be tempted to pass a hand through the seemingly permeable hologram and find it battered by a tilted carbon fibre screen that spins so fast it becomes invisible. An elaborate and otherwise visible apparatus - motor, stand, acrylic case, video projector, cradle and mirror - converges to produce the vision.



This knot-ghost might be the genius loci, the spirit of the place, or the manifestation of Maxwell’s Demon. Maxwell’s Demon is the conceit or thought experiment of James Clerk Maxwell, the C19th Kirkcudbrightshire physicist, mathematician and maker of optical devices. The Demon is a being of no physicality that guards a doorway between two chambers of gas. It allows all the fast moving molecules to gather on one side thus creating a difference in temperature between the two. It thereby, purportedly, contradicts the second law of thermodynamics which states that in a closed system entropy will increase and differences between temperature and pressure will even out. The Demon is the meeting point of science and the imagination, an image of journeys between places and of the relationship between human perception and the physical world. It is also an illusion – a seemingly credible but flawed proposition. It points to the impossibility of objectively knowing everything; instead we catch detail, absurdity and co-incidence and use these to explain the world to ourselves.



The sound in the installation is made by displacing information from a scientific system and deploying it within an aesthetic one. The ZephIR is a meteorological device which can read the behaviour of the air above itself to a height of 300 metres. Its usual application is in the field of wind power. Here, in the service of art, the ZephIR translates the wind into data; the artists generate a musical score from the data; and the score is interpreted in collaboration with musicians from a local ska band. From air movement – wind - to instrument to score to instrument to another air movement - music. This process produces a music that is made not so much of melody but of its sounds – the drag of bow on string or of a breath in a pipe, the press and pluck of keys and strings and their relationship in time. Music is purely a highly organised arrangement of wind.

Download music (43mb mp3)

The third element of Maxwell‘s Demon is the small projected video of a wicker headed bird-like Mummer sculling around a loch. The Mummer, like carnival, is a folk tradition that makes the everyday strange. Mummers die and rejuvenate; in carnival the peasant wears the crown; the everyday is confounded within the everyday; one thing is displaced into the territory of another. The Mummer is lost in the landscape, or simply aimless, or absurdly feeling his way, deliberately making the landscape strange to himself.

The Mummer is also the archetypal storyteller, the stranger who returns and tells tall tales of elsewhere, or another time, or another version of events. Helson and Jackets spent much of their time meeting and speaking to people who told their truths, histories and anecdotes as stories. The simple device of the recorded interview unleashes storms of imagery and poetic resonance: stories of floods, sustainable energy, giants, espionage, melodies remembered by only one person, C14th guerrilla warfare, C17th guerrilla worship, a sweet shop, a sheep dog and a zoetrope. On the website glenkens.net the accounts are clustered so that connections at crossed purposes might be made.



There is something of the Demon‘s practice in what Helson and Jackets do. By a process of selection and arrangement, made according to a logic and perception that is not necessarily evident from outside, they create in the artwork a release of energy - unexpected and kinetic. Glenkens becomes for us a realm of spectre, spectacle and speculation, of delight and curiosity and mystery.

What happens if we try to understand space via, simultaneously, anecdote, mathematics, mis-hearing and new technology?

Shirley MacWilliam