The International System of Units

My city, like many other cities, has a waste recycling point. This recycling point is funded by city taxes and thus every inhabitant of the city gets twelve 'free' visits a year. Of course, there is a limit to the amount of waste one can bring to the recycling point on each of these visits. 

On their website the city has posted some guidelines for a number of categories of waste. My favourite of these is 'Small Chemical Waste', of which one can bring a 'maximum 0.5 m³ per visit, including latex and paint'.
This never stops being funny to me, as my city apparently considers six thousands litres per year a perfectly normal amount of chemical waste for a regular household.

Those Lying Bastards

In the previous months I've been in a somewhat unique position where I was simultaneously working on two publications. The first of these is a small monographic publication on some of my own drawings. The second is a research report on some physical characteristics of a novel alkyd resin. Naturally, the first of these deals with art in the freest sense, while the second is a strictly scientific publication, meant to provide reproducible insights upon which future research can be based.

And while working on these publications, a very clear distinction between art and science revealed itself to me. The distinction is obvious, but not commonly discussed, so I believe it's valuable to discuss it here.

The artistic publication I'm working on concerns itself with drawings of stick figures that perform certain movements that were memorable to me. Because I can't produce visual imagery in my mind, actively recalling movement for me is difficult, if not impossible. It was therefore interesting to explore this by creating distinctive stick figures, that are nevertheless awkwardly positioned and proportioned because I can't recall the nuances of the movements. On the one hand these show a great understanding of form in the abstract sense, yet on the other hand they are also poorly drawn and unrealistic.
In the introductory text to the publication I've written that 'this book is but a number of drawings. Each of them was an attempt to draw from memory those movements which can’t live in my mind.'
And this is a lie.
In the process of making the publication there were many times where I worked directly from photographic reference material. This was necessary in order to show the dichotomy between my abstract understanding of shapes and artistic techniques. Doing that involved highlighting interesting and easily recognised movements, and they have to adhere to a certain 'ideal' in order for me to place emphasis on the skewed knowledge I have of them. Showing the 'true' skewed memory I have would make recognising the starting point challenging, so for many of these drawings I worked from reference material to some extent. Below is an example of the same drawing, one truly from memory and one I made using references:

As you can see, these drawings are very different. The pose of the first drawing, made from memory, doesn't posses the nuance and comprehensibility of the second. The original point of this specific pose, a reading of the body as the letter 'K', is even largely lost in the first drawing. And although I can easily recognise that this is so, I couldn't imagine what I should do to change that.

To lie in my actions therefore fits the truth of the narrative better than merely showing the drawing that adheres to the factual truth. This kind of abstraction of reality in order to clarify your point of view is very common in the arts. It might even be one of the main aims or achievements of visual art, as can be gleaned from the common term 'artistic license' for such creative interpretations of the truth.

This is of course in sharp contrast with the aims and methodologies of science. No scientist should ever attempt to bend the factual truth in order to better fit their own preferred narrative.
If as a scientist my results don't fit my desired narrative, then it's the narrative that has to change, not the results. This might lead to something ugly, messy and incomprehensible, but that's unfortunate only for me as a person. One has to abide by the factual truths that one is confronted with, even if understanding and explaining those truths is rarely a straightforward and elegant path.
For scientific results to be reproducible, it's also important to be as comprehensive as possible about your methods. Any parameter, any tool, anything that might have influenced your research is supposed to be included in your description of the experiment. Exhaustive descriptions of methods and materials, as well as their influence, are preferably quantified and explained in the text.
Such a completeness of information is almost never polished and simple, with many little things that were adapted to changing circumstances over time. But unlike in art, in science there is no way to discard unwanted information. No way to make your narrative more easily digested by leaving out or altering crucial details. Everything and anything has to be included, nothing can be left out.

It is therefore impossible in science to increase the readers comprehension simply by making the available information fit the narrative, while in art the exact selection of information to fit your narrative is often a basic necessity.
If you understand this fundamental distinction, it's easy to see why rigorous scientific research can't ever be good art, and why research that focusses on an artistic narrative can't ever be science.

Stephen's Sausage Roll

Stephen's Sausage Roll is a puzzle videogame, created by Stephen Lavelle and first released on the 18^th of April, 2016. I first played it two years later, on April 19, 2018. A few weeks after that I completed the game. Enthralled by what I experienced, I first attempted to find the words to clarify my experience in 2019, almost five years ago. Back then I was unable to express what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll so unique that its shadow looms over any other puzzle game I've played since. It nevertheless has been on my mind in all that time and I've replayed it in full somewhere in 2020-2021. Recently I've started playing it again, and this time I feel like I had some insight into what the game forces you to do that makes it such a radical experience.

The premise of Stephen's Sausage Roll is seemingly simple, even banal. It's a sokoban-style game, which means that the player controls a character and you have to push objects on a grid-based system to put them in specific positions. You play as an unnamed character, often called Stephen. You're holding a oddly-shaped fork and you roll sausages onto grills.
The game consists of an overworld of interconnected levels, each containing a single puzzle. Within a group of puzzles the player is free to choose in which order they want to solve the levels. To enter a level one simply aligns 'Stephen' with the Stephen-shaped translucent outline in the overworld. 

You then enter a level that contains the player's character, one or more grill tiles and one or more sausages.

The objective of each level is then to grill all sausages on both sides. You do this by pushing the sausages so they roll over.

When all sausages are grilled, you have to return to your starting position. This is non-trivial in some levels.

And that's it. That's the game's entire foundation. Grilling slightly more than 200 sausages is all you have to do. It's a simple premise, but it reaches a great depth through its pitch-perfect execution.

Reaching this depth is only possible because everything in Stephen's Sausage Roll has a function. Even if rolling sausages seems like a silly premise, the shape of the sausages determine their movement. Each sausage is two tiles long and one tile wide, but most importantly it is cylindrical, has a top and a bottom and therefore it can roll over. This in turn determines its movement, which can be distinguished between a roll and a slide. The comically oversized fork of Stephen makes it so your player character also takes up two tiles, but he instead has a front and a back and a centre of rotation that is clearly placed on only one of the tiles. In later levels it also becomes possible to separate the fork from the figure, which brings a whole new dimension into play.
The same exacting attention to detail is unmistakeably present in the level design. The world of Stephen's Sausage Roll is fully interconnected, the overworld is simply what happens when all the ground tiles from all the levels are present at the same time.

This is all the more impressive because in each of the levels, taken on their own, there are exactly enough elements present to solve, or sometimes create, the puzzle. There is not a single superfluous tile in the entire game. At times there are open 'fields', but their function is usually only to make the awkward movement of the character more tolerable to the player. 

Take The Great Tower, for example. This is commonly the level where the shock of possibilities really dawns on the player. Up until that point all sausage rolling has taken place in a two-dimensional plane and then this daunting behemoth shows up unannounced. Yet the level itself is quite generous. There is a large field where the player can mess about with the mechanics while dismantling the tower, so they can (sub)consciously teach themselves how the sausages (inter)act in a third dimensional plane.

And teaching yourself how Stephen Sausage Roll works is a vital part of the gameplay. The game is often described as 'difficult' and when this is seen as a negative aspect, one of the criticisms aimed at the game is that it doesn't do a good job at teaching its rules to players. I would very strongly disagree with this sentiment, however, because it simply isn't true. There aren't a lot of rules or mechanics present in Stephen's Sausage Roll. In fact, I already covered nearly all of them in this post so far. Thus knowing the rules to the puzzles in Stephen's Sausage Roll is almost trivial and anybody with the slightest knowledge of video game mechanics will instantly be familiar with them.
What's unique about the game is not the complexity of its rule set, but that it's only concerned with the ultimate logical consequences of that set of rules. From a few simple rules, Stephen's Sausage Roll extracts a great number of complex, and at times unintuitive, possibilities. What's more is that it expects of you to understand these right from start of the game.
The first levels in Stephen's Sausage Roll are likely the most difficult to the player, because they have to internalise the logical outcomes of a system they aren't yet familiar with. Most levels in Stephen's Sausage Roll demand that you reason backward from the unseen, but implied, end state of the puzzle. The player has to reverse engineer the puzzle-making process, so to speak.

As a player you have to understand the final position of all the sausages if you want to be able to solve the puzzles. This doesn't mean that if you know an end position you have also solved the puzzle, as is the case in many other games. No, in Stephen's Sausage Roll this is simply the beginning. Nowhere is this more clear than in an early puzzle titled the Clover.

At first glance the level appears relatively straightforward, as all sausages are located directly next to a four-tile grill. Yet when you proceed to grill the sausages in that way you ultimately end up in the following predicament when you attempt to return to your starting position:

This is an 'unexpected' outcome because as a player you're initially only thinking of the abstract goal of the puzzles: to grill some sausages. Yet returning to your starting position is a crucial aspect of the puzzles and thus it is not the grilling of the sausages that one needs to be concerned with, but grilling the sausages so that they end up in a particular position. In order to do this, you need to trace your steps backwards from the end goal and see what initial movements can lead to this outcome.

This backwards reasoning is somewhat common in puzzle games, but Stephen's Sausage Roll is the only game I can think of that absolutely requires this kind of understanding if you want to progress in the game at a reasonable pace. There is very little, if anything, in the game that entertains a player with an incomplete understanding of its mechanics. If you experience frustration in Stephen's Sausage Roll, and there will be plenty of moments where you do, it's only because of your own incomplete understanding. From the very beginning the game always provides you with all the knowledge you need, but not a single sliver more than that.
Even if I am now quite familiar with the possibilities of Stephen's Sausage Roll, in all my playthroughs I found that the game got easier, not harder, as I went on. Even as the complexities of the puzzles grows exponentially towards the end of the game, having much more experience with its rules means that it's far easier to see and understand the solutions to these more complex puzzles.
And at the point where you as a player have acquired this necessary insight into its mechanics, then the levels look less and less like puzzles, but more like an attempt to express a certain idea about the game and its possibility-space. In nearly all instances these are elegantly communicated through the minimal, yet absurdist design, and the game becomes a beautiful glimpse into the mind of Lavelle as a designer.

Although I've come much closer to expressing my feelings about Stephen's Sausage Roll with this text than I did on previous attempts, I still don't believe I've quite been able to articulate the exact nature of what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll so extraordinary. After six years this short text of adjectives is apparently the best I can do. Therefore I strongly suggest you play the game for yourself and experience first hand what I and many other commentators have difficulty finding the right words for.

Please (don't) take a seat

 At the recent solo-exhibition of Sung Hwan Kim at the van Abbe Museum I encountered the following set up:

In case my low-quality phone photograph isn't clear enough, what we have here are two rectangular black objects made of wood. They are of near-identical height and placed on the floor about 1,5 meters in front of a screen that is showing a video.
What is strange about this is that one is marked 'Please take a seat', while on the other it's written to 'Please don't sit'. The first is meant as a bench to sit on and watch a video, the second is a box that houses a projector.
To include two almost identical objects with opposite functions is such an absurdly stupid decision that it could have easily been the premise for a Monthy Phython sketch.

The Difficulty of Forgetting

A few months after my grandmother died, there were a few of her belongings left at my parents' house, including a simple painting of a farm. 'We tried to see if it was worth something', my dad said. 'And it was about sixty euro's', I immediately replied. 'Yeah! Yeah, it was!', he said, surprised, as if he had no idea how I spent my time in the preceding fifteen years. He naturally was also a little bit disappointed with the painting's value. It had hung so long in my grandmother's house that the whole family probably thought it was very valuable.
In either case, I don't know where that painting is currently. Perhaps in my parents'  attic, or at an uncle's house. I can't even rule out the possibility it was simply thrown away.

My point is that whenever I see the claim that an artist was 'rediscovered', they were never forgotten or unrecognised in the first place. It takes a substantial amount of attention, effort, space and other resources to preserve any kind of artwork for more than a few months, let alone decades or centuries. So whenever I see more than a single work turn up by a 'forgotten' artist, you just know that that's a false claim. Somebody somewhere cared very deeply about those works and went to great lengths to safeguard them.
If you have even a handful of people actively safeguarding your work while you're still alive, then you're a very, very, lucky person. And if this is still true when you're dead then you're even luckier.