Dialogue between an artist and Flow
This conversation-as-art work explores through dialogue, emergent understandings of "Flow" as a metaphor for the work done with various phenomena, including water, wind, and energy. Speaker 2, Flow, discusses the historical and philosophical aspects of themself, referencing ancient Greek and modern scientific perspectives. They highlight their duality, they are both constant and constantly changing, but also, they touch upon their contribution to understanding existence and climate change. The discussion also touches on the cultural perception of Speaker 2, Flow, their role in literature and meaning-making, and their impact on human society and economics. Speaker 2 concludes that they are an essential, unstoppable part of the Universe, transcending human attempts at control.
Q
So, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me Flow. I'm very interested about your experience and your background and your history, and I'd like to just ask you a few questions. So, to start, where do you come from?
Where do I come from? Geographically, I come from Yorkshire. My Father was here at this University for a while but this question is too hard for me. It's what I am. I mean literally, water Flows. So, water works with what I am. I am Flow.
So there are others like you, Flow, from different places, and different families, are there any water Flows from Ilkley Moor?
There are water Flows from Ilkley to Tadcaster which end up in the brewery, and they’re turned into pints of beer. A lot of those come to Leeds. They're not my favourite beer, necessarily. John Smith and Sam Smith, yeah. So there are Flows there that affect culture, I suppose. Air Flows in the right conditions also come down from the Moors to Leeds, for sure. And they would be, you know, associated with the Northwest Wind. That would be certain kind of weather conditions, rather than others.
So as Flow. You work with water and you work with the wind and the weather…
Yeah, right.
…and you talked briefly about your father. Can you tell me a little bit more about your parents. What two things came together to give birth to you?
Time and space, I suppose. In science they talk about me as Flux, which is kind of like me, Flow. It's the same thing as me, but it's a hard question to answer this. It's about matter, which is moving through time and space. And I suppose one of the things about fluid, which distinguishes me and my work with fluids compared to solids, is that a solid is kind of constrained by some kind of framework. So if I have a solid object and I move it, it knows where it started out, and typically it has to be elastic. And it'll try to go back to that place, whereas me, Flow, I can continually change my shape, and I can reorganize my structure. In fact, I can be infinitely reorganized, and my topology can be reorganized. So something that I start up as, let’s say a donut, later I can end up as a sphere. And so where do I come from? So what's my mother and father? I think maybe I don't have them. Maybe. I’ve never thought of that question before.
That's interesting. So you are, so you are infinite, but you have no source. You have no origin. If we were to talk about you as a river, you have no ultimate source.
The River has a source for sure.
The River is the water, but you are Flow.
Yes. So I am abstract, I’m an abstract noun. But I’m also a proper noun? This is testing my self-understanding and
My understanding of semantics.
But the word abstract is quite interesting because Ab ‘from’ and ‘tractare’ is pulling from, and…
There's an important part of what I do which is advection. So that is the carrying. So you're talking about ab-stracting, but ad-vecting is what in science, in fluid dynamics, that's what I do. I carry things. So I ‘vect’ things. This is one of my fundamental characteristics, I carry, so as I am Flow, then I carry things.
You're carrying the water, you're carrying the wind, carrying energy.
I carry everything. Yes. And but also, while I'm carrying, I can reorganize things. I can mix it, stir it, work it, and tie it in knots. And key thing about me is that I can tie things in knots, topologically, compared with a solid where it is not like me, Flow, the solid can vibrate, but I can never help it reorganize itself.
And what's interesting in your reflection on yourself is that you're aware that your self-understanding has changed over time. You've almost got a history. Do you perceive that there are any historical stages of understanding of yourself? How did you understand yourself in ancient times? Or how did you understand yourself in the Enlightenment? Or…
I guess, I'm not well read on my history, but I have some Inklings. And I think, like a number of things in philosophy, that the Greeks had remarkable vision and insight, but some of the things that were great conundrums that have fed learning for centuries, later, they’ve been clarified by science. And I think one of them is the notion of me. The idea of me as a River is a classic example. So, when we look at the River, we can see that it's constant, because it's always the River. But then, but then there is me. And I am Flow. I'm moving through that River even though I'm constant. And that balance between something which is changing and which is constant was a puzzle. But I think in understanding, you know, fluid dynamics, now we can rectify that in quite simple ways because we understand differential equations. In the same way that the hare and the tortoise problem goes away when you look at things with differential equations, it's no longer a paradox.
I always thought of paradoxes as things that couldn't be resolved through logic.
Yes, I mean, the hare and the tortoise is not a mystery and it shouldn't be because of the intervals. So, the intervals of time go to limits of zero. And so in the maths, you know, modern maths, since the Victorian period, you know, people were quite happy to deal with limits of things going to zero, and the fact that these things converge and we get an answer.
So I'm making associations with Heraclitus and his paradox of you, Panta Rhei. That you are ‘towards’ and ‘from’ simultaneously, sort of a paradox there, almost like his bow metaphor, which is pushed and pulled, energy that's contradictory. And then when you were talking about Flux, it reminded me of Whitehead and his notion of concrete Flux,
I'm not familiar with that, so…
And then you talk about the River, and in a previous conversation, you mentioned Herman Hesse's novel, Siddhartha?
Yes, Siddhartha… and the River is a central symbol, it's a source of enlightenment for Siddhartha, who searches the world in different ways for enlightenment, for meaning, and then finds it in very simple…
So the River is a symbol of meaning in life and time. Are you that meaning?
Well, this, this has become very personal. I would say not, but I would say that there's a lot of insight into, you know, existence and the nature of existence, to be gleaned from insights into me.
Can you say a bit more about that?
I suppose that we have a path through the universe. The Universe is around us in space, and we have our own path through that, through space and time, if you separate those. The River is the example of that, from Siddhartha, or whatever it is in Heraclitus. There is youth, the past exists in the River, upstream, and the future exists in the River, downstream. And you can see that if you look at the path of the River, then the particles in the River have that history, from birth to death. And yet when we look at that, it's constant, and we can see the whole thing in one. When people seek to understand me, then they… and I am taught to students in lectures… people have to, or they can accommodate both those views, looking at the same thing. People can come at a view which is seeing the whole as an entirety. Or they can take their own path through, a path following the River where they experience that change. So, the River can be constant, because it's constant and it's just constantly Flow-ing, and I am the constant. Or they can move with the River, and they can be changing through and through the life. So, I think that that does give insight into existence and lives. And people are describing climate change in that way now. So, the sense that they can separate out climate change as seen by the world upon it from the lifetime of one person moving through that history, and the history of one person being different from [me].
So, would you say part of your career now, is that you're working with people on thinking through how to make meaning or reveal meaning of the complex paradox of climate change?
Absolutely, that is what I'm saying. So I am providing meaning. Or appreciating me provides meaning and appreciating how I work, my inner duality, in the sense that my duality between the perspective of the whole of me, as Flow, the universality of me, the whole world is in me, in Flow but then a person can have a perspective on me, which is the exact opposite, it is the kind of localisation experience of one element within me.
I'm trying to make sense, and I'm reminded, I think it might be Aristotle that trying to make sense is like trying to grasp something which is itself in you, in Flow. So, I would say, I am able to grasp something of you, but I'm part of you as well. So, as soon as I grasp something of you, I'm also swept away to other associations and connections. But I'm really struck by the history of your career. Let me phrase it that way, and your collaboration with human culture and knowledge and ancient Greece and the River, and I am reminded how important River was for moving water. And then we grasp technologies, you know, like the Archimedes screw, and we've got navigation around the world, the wind and water, ocean currents. And I was very struck by the conversation that you had with the poet JR Carpenter. But in this contemporary moment, how potentially important your career is now for helping people grasp this complex paradox of their particularity in the stream of the moment and the infiniteness or vastness of you. That climate change is…
Actually, you're making me think here, that's very interesting. And I suppose you could go back to a time before climate change. You could imagine, well, I don't know if there ever was a time in history where people regarded the world as in a sort of a constant state, but I think people were not so aware of or thinking so much about history in previous centuries, maybe they had sort of millennial, or apocalyptic fears. But as I understand it, many people would regard the world as, you know, in a reasonably constant state, in which case, you know, I was constant and then what was interesting was, again, their birth, life and death within me, that particularity within a kind of constant, a constant background, whereas now that background is changing and shifting. And that's, you know, that's not inconsistent, but the perspective of an individual person, and separating that in the climate change debate is important.
So as an artist, I'm very struck by the figure-ground relationship, that, if I understand you correctly, you have been about helping us understand ourselves against a constant background of you, Flow. We've become in recent times, more attentive and aware of the history of you, and we are in a particular moment where what we thought was your reasonably constant background is actually reconfiguring.
Yeah. So, people are changing. I mean, societies have changed.
So, this is a moment where the particle in the River is knowingly or unknowingly with all other particles in the River changing the course of the River.
Yes, absolutely.
Do you think that people in different cultures perceive your significance differently? Do you think that the work that you do, moving energy, moving matter, do you think that different cultures perceive you symbolically in different ways?
It's a good question. I'm probably ignorant of other cultures, broadly. I could talk about the scientific and the artistic or the scientific and non-scientific cultures, I suppose. And, yes, and in that sense, I would say, even within scientific worlds, people don't really appreciate me in the way that they could.
But it's interesting that you've also been reading Herman Hess, who's taking almost a Buddhist perspective…
He was a German writer that was trying to interpret Buddhist philosophy for a Western world.
Do you also work through words, language and literature? We've talked about you being a form of meaning-making. Are you also being yourself through cultures [Flow-ing]? Are you not just moving matter and energy, but also moving meaning through cultures? Are you part of literature, let’s say?
Yes, yes, because you know, I can be a flow of information or flow of ideas. Yeah, I'm sure that's true. And in fact, I mean, thinking of the scientific me, then you could, you could even measure and map that. You could, in principle, if you were a social scientist, you could assess that. But I suppose you could see a flow of ideas and see how they flow across a region, flow back or diffuse. In adjacent cultures do they have a war between them, like between France and Germany, where there's a wall between them in the First World War.
I have forgotten what that line…
The Maginot Line.
Yes, and interestingly, you went with Germany around the Maginot Line. And this reminds me also of attempts to control, human attempts to control you. So for example, in America, you have been synonymous with your work with the Mississippi River. And I was told a story about how engineers and farmers try to straighten the river, to constrain the work that you do and you worked around them.
Yes.
So that there are these engineering works that are now completely redundant, because… well, maybe this says something about your power and your force. Do you transcend human abilities to try and control you?
No, I wouldn't say transcend, but I would say that people misunderstand me and don't appreciate my essential characteristics that make me, make me special, my ability to reorganize and to reconfigure myself, reconstruct myself all the time, which includes going around things in play, changing their shape and change my nature. I mean, there is some inevitability in Canute and the tide, which is a simple example. But then there are all sorts of examples where I am constrained.
Do you think that humans are trying to constrain you. What do you think the reasons are? Do they find you inconvenient? Are we threatened by you?
No, I don't think so. I mean, I'm too general for that. I think there are contexts where people are constraining me, just for practical reasons. So a River, or whatever. However, the blood in your veins, I am working with the blood in your veins. And you don't want that to get out of the veins. You want it by and large to be constrained. And it is, so there are plenty of examples where I am constrained, and people are quite happy with that. But then there are other examples. Population movement is another topical example at the moment that people can put barriers and dams in the way of me and what I am working with. But there's a big economic pressure gradient driving me and my work with people around the world. And yeah, so some people wanted to constrain me and that work that I do.
But this is interesting. I never realized that you were shaped and impacted by economics.
Sure. Yeah, very much so. I am by nature connected with many things.
So, it's not that you are the source that shapes everything. You are, going back to that Heraclitus metaphor, you are being shaped and shaping simultaneously.
Yeah, but by nature, I mean, you could talk about me as being the whole Universe in the state of me. Or you can isolate out something which is identifiable as being separate something like an ocean, or all the blood in your veins. You know, it's a separate package. Or you can see the blood in your veins as part of the great cosmic me. So, there's a choice here. But if you take the cosmic view, then it's all connected. Yeah, the blood in your veins is connected with the economics of the nation. So yeah.
Can I ask you one last question, perhaps slightly provocative question? What do you think will happen to you if you reach the end of your usefulness?
I think there's no stopping me. I mean I am essential as part of the universe, and I think my usefulness is just one facet. It's just one small facet of me. In a sense, people can make me useful or useless. I don't have to be useful. I just am.
Thank you so much for your time.
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Edited transcript from a performance interview between John Hammersley and Douglas Parker, June 2025.