Thursday, August 26, 2010

Lexicon_01: Robert Smithson


Robert Smithson: "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"


(http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/images/media/doc/a9e/1242319091-large.jpg)



"maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past---just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River Drive) does a good business in Stone, Bituminous, Sand, and Cement."

utopia (topic-based)

1. an imaginary island. 2. an ideal place or state. 3. any visionary system of political or social perfection.

"the irreversibility of eternity by using a jejune experiment for proving entropy. Picture in your mind's eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy."

entropy (descriptive / active)

1. a macroscopic property of a system that is a measure of the microscopic disorder within the system 2. a measure ofthe loss of information in a transmitted signal or message 3. a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.

jejune (descriptive / active)

1. without interest or significance; dull; 2. lacking knowledge or experience; uninformed:

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