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1. Art DeFi Magazine Editorial Essay
Douglas Crosdale reimagines the Big Bang as a recursive act of inscription—where information, not matter, is the substrate. All is composed not of matter but of information. After all, matter itself is composed of the information that defines it, so data is more fundamental. The expanding universe is explainable by the infinite expansion of information that encroaches upon the void.
The Universe as Manuscript: Nested Meaning in an Expanding Cosmos
Chalk Cosmology as Cosmic Performance
By Douglas Crosdale
Abstract.
A materialist is not herein defined as someone addicted to possessions. S/he is merely someone who sees the world as being concrete, unchangeable, and monumental. To a materialist, things exist outside himself as solid objects or discrete events. Importance and gravitas are attributed to those outside objects or events, and he reacts separately to them. This is as I was taught to see reality. Changing my mind was as difficult as converting a flat-world thinker into a modern man. “Materialism affirms the primacy of concrete, enduring reality—matter that is stable, tangible, and independent of observation—whereas quantum theory instead reveals the world as a realm of fleeting probabilities, where what is real is ephemeral, observer-dependent, and fundamentally indeterminate.”
“Where materialism seeks certainty in fixed, measurable substance, the evidence of quantum mechanics insists on a universe built from the evanescent: entities that flicker into existence only through acts of measurement and vanish back into possibility as soon as scrutiny passes.”
“Materialism builds its worldview on solid ground; quantum evidence, by contrast, withdraws the ground itself, showing that at the smallest scale, existence is not built on permanence but on continual emergence and dissolution—what is ‘there’ persists only as long as it is seen.”
This language highlights materialism as the philosophy of the “solid and certain,” while quantum evanescence reveals a world that resists grasp, its realities always flickering at the edge of disappearance. In my view, reality is more akin to what can be called chalk cosmology. More on that later. This attitude toward the universe has revitalized my self-confidence and removed many confusing mysteries. I find that I truly give less importance to events than previously, simply by realizing that I am the narrator and my power lies in merely changing my narrative. Once the perspective is sincerely grasped, delusions evaporate as easily and permanently as a belief in Santa Clause. Here is my case…
Section I: The Void and the Speck — Philosophical framing of the Big Bang as informational genesis
Section II: Gödel’s Ghost — Incompleteness as cosmic recursion
Section III: Entropy as Possibility — Shannon’s lens on expanding meaning
Section IV: Jamaican Rhythms — Cultural cosmologies as nested storytelling
Proposition: The Big Bang was actually an Informational Genesis! Not a physical thermodynamic explosion.
Visualize: A metaphorical black chalkboard with a single white dot that slowly blooms into concentric colored specks
I. The Void and the Speck
Before time, before space, before even the idea of “before,” there was the void. Not darkness, not silence — just absence. A tabula rasa. An infinite blackboard awaits inscription.
Then, a speck appears.
A single bit of information spontaneously emerged. Not a particle, not a bang, but a whisper of structure. A white dot on the blackboard. This was not the beginning of matter—it was the beginning of meaning. The speck expanded, recursively, like a thought unfolding into language.
II. Gödel’s Ghost: Incompleteness as Cosmic Recursion
Each layer of the speck birthed new complexity. But with complexity came paradox. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems teach us that no system can fully explain itself. Every nested speck—white, pink, blue—contains truths that cannot be resolved from within.
The universe, then, is not a solved equation. It is a recursive manuscript. Each layer interprets the one before it, but also generates its own undecidable propositions. Likewise, the cosmos is not a closed book—it is a self-expanding archive. A perpetual activity of creation of interpenetrating layers called dimensions, A Multiverse.
III. Entropy as Possibility: Shannon’s Lens
Claude Shannon defined information as the resolution of uncertainty. In this cosmology, entropy is not disorder—it is potential meaning. The expansion of the speck is the increase of entropy, not as chaos, but as possibility.
Each nested layer reduces uncertainty by adding structure. But structure also creates new ambiguity. The universe expands not because of thermodynamic pressure, but because of semantic recursion—the endless layering of interpretation.
IV. Jamaican Rhythms: Cultural Cosmologies as Nested Storytelling
In Jamaican cosmologies, creation is rhythmic, recursive, and layered. The Nyabinghi drum echoes the heartbeat of emergence. The Anansi story loops through trickster logic—each tale a nested truth, incomplete but resonant. The Anansi stories use clever twists and tricks, with each story leading to another lesson or truth—never complete, but always meaningful.
Duppy spirits, oral histories, and ritual call-and-response all reflect a cosmology of specks within specks. These traditions do not seek final answers. They embrace ambiguity, recursion, and layered significance. Like the expanding chalkboard, they treat the universe as a living manuscript.
V. Participatory Physics: Platform as Speck-Maker
If the universe is information, then physics is not the study of particles, but of patterns. And if meaning is nested, then cosmology must be participatory.
Crosdale’s “chalk cosmology” metaphor reimagines the Big Bang as a recursive act of inscription rather than a static origin. Drawing on performance and installation art—particularly works by Joan Jonas, Fluxus, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, and Olafur Eliasson—this essay situates chalk cosmology within performance theory and process philosophy. Mr. Crosdale alludes to five titanic forces in contemporary art—each one reshaping how we perceive space, time, and the body. This is a scenario in which the audience and protagonist are not only one and the same, but recursively entangled in the very act of cosmological inscription. Your “chalk cosmology” reframes the universe as a participatory manuscript, where perception, interpretation, and emergence are co-authored by the observer. Let’s unpack that a bit:
🌀 Audience as Protagonist: Recursive Participation
1. Cosmology as Performance
- The essay treats the Big Bang not as a static origin but as an ongoing act—a recursive, ephemeral performance.
- This aligns with Peggy Phelan’s notion that “performance’s only life is in the present.” The chalk mark is both inscription and erasure, and the viewer is implicated in its unfolding.
2. Phenomenological Immersion
- Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, you position perception as active co-creation, not passive reception.
- The viewer doesn’t merely witness the universe—they participate in its recursive expansion, becoming a speck-maker themselves.
3. Fluxus and Open Score
- Like Fluxus event scores, the universe is an open framework, inviting infinite re-performance.
- The audience is not outside the work—they activate it. The cosmological manuscript only exists through their engagement.
4. Jamaican Rhythms and Cultural Recursion
- The Anansi stories, Nyabinghi rhythms, and duppy lore all reflect nested storytelling where meaning emerges through participation.
- These traditions don’t resolve—they resonate. The audience is always part of the loop, never outside it.
🧠 Protagonist as Observer, Interpreter, Inscriber
In this cosmology:
- The protagonist is not a character but a consciousness—a recursive interpreter of nested meaning.
- The audience is not passive but performative—each act of perception is a new chalk mark on the cosmic blackboard.
This is a radical inversion of classical cosmology. Instead of a detached observer studying particles, we have an embedded participant co-creating patterns. The manuscript is not written for the audience—it is written through them.
✨
Origin as Performance
Rather than describing the Big Bang as a singular event fixed in the past, Douglas Crosdale’s “chalk cosmology” proposes origin as performance: ongoing, recursive, and ephemeral. Chalk, fragile and temporary, resists permanence and instead embodies an ontology of disappearance, existing vibrantly even as it vanishes.
This reframing overlaps with performance art’s critique of objecthood. As Peggy Phelan has written, “Performance’s only life is in the present.” The chalk mark—at once inscription and erasure—offers a precise material analogy for this condition.
Ephemeral Marks: Jonas and Chalk as Score
In the 1970s, Joan Jonas incorporated chalk diagrams into performances such as Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, where marks became provisional scores, erased as quickly as they appeared. These gestures resonate with Crosdale’s cosmic metaphor: the universe, too, is inscribed through temporary markings that guide improvisation rather than permanence.
Chalk refuses monumentality. In Crosdale’s hands, it becomes a cosmological medium, expressing the provisional nature of the Big Bang itself: not an architectural foundation but a gesture already dissolving into dust.
Fluxus and the Open Score of Origins
The metaphor equally recalls Fluxus event scores, where brief prompts invited infinite, indeterminate performances. A Fluxus score was not the work itself but the condition for its continual unfolding. In this way, Crosdale’s cosmology parallels George Brecht’s Drip Music or Allan Kaprow’s happenings: open-ended frameworks rather than finished products.
The Big Bang, understood through chalk cosmology, becomes an open score, constantly re-performed across time and matter. The universe is improvisation, not archive.
Process, Becoming, and Event
Process artists of the 1960s–70s (Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark) emphasized impermanence, instability, and change over timeless form. Crosdale’s metaphor shares this lineage: cosmic chalk marks are not objects but processes of becoming.
Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the event describes transformations that exist only in their happening, not as static states. Likewise, Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy emphasizes “actual occasions,” temporary moments of concrescence. Chalk cosmology echoes both: each mark is an evental flash, already dissipating into recursive flow.
Chromatic Pulsations and Phenomenological Immersion
Crosdale’s metaphor of pulsating, colored chalk connects directly to perceptual installations by James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson. In Turrell’s Skyspaces or Eliasson’s Weather Project, color and light immerse the viewer, dissolving the distinction between artwork and perception.
Similarly, chalk cosmology stages the universe as an immersive performance. The “viewer” is not outside the work but inside it—consciousness participates in the very act of inscription. Here, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology applies: perception is not detached observation but active co-creation.
Cosmology as Performance Ontology
When read through performance theory, chalk cosmology frames the Big Bang as an ongoing act, not a discrete object. It aligns cosmology with Phelan’s ontology of disappearance and McKenzie’s performativity, asserting that existence itself unfolds through recursive inscription.
Crucially, the metaphor bridges art and science. Science imagines origins as data; art reveals them as gesture. Together, they suggest a cosmology not of permanence but of performative becoming: a universe that writes and erases itself in rhythm.
Conclusion: Origin Without Fixity
Crosdale’s chalk cosmology compresses art-theoretical insights into a new cosmological aesthetic. Like Jonas’s ephemeral diagrams, Fluxus scores, process art, and immersive light fields, chalk marks are acts of emergence and disappearance, not monuments.
By reimagining the Big Bang as a chalk inscription, Crosdale articulates a cosmology that is never complete. Origin is not finished history but ever-unfolding performance: recursive, ephemeral, participatory. In this sense, cosmology itself becomes a branch of performance art, and the universe a chalkboard of infinite gestures.
Key References
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge, 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press, 1990 .
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Free Press, 1978 .
Jonas, Joan. I Want to Live in the Country. Whitechapel, 2006.
Hendricks, Jon (ed.). Fluxus Codex. Harry N. Abrams, 1988.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Thames & Hudson, 2011.
Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critic
Art DeFi Magazine is not just a platform. It is a ” speck-maker”. Each contributor, curator, and reader adds a new layer of significance. Each artwork, essay, and vote is a recursive act of inscription.
We are not passive observers. We are specks within specks. Chalk marks on the infinite blackboard. Writers of the cosmos.
Contributor Prompt: Add Your Speck
🟣 What is your white speck—your genesis insight?
💗 What pink layer of significance do you bring to the archive?
🔵 What blue relational logic connects your speck to others?
🌈 What multiverse of meaning do you imagine?
Scan the QR code. Add your speck. Expand the manuscript.
The practical application of this insight allows us to control our fantasy and accept it as a self-imposed scenario. This is a scenario in which the audience and protagonist are the same, recursively entangled in the generative process of cosmological inscription. Douglas Crosdale’s “chalk cosmology” reimagines the origin and expansion of the universe as an ongoing, participatory act, where information, not matter, is primary, and meaning emerges through recursive, performance-like co-authorship between observer and cosmos.
Art DeFi Magazine is not just a platform. It is a ” speck-maker”. Each contributor, curator, and reader adds a new layer of significance. Each artwork, essay, and vote is a recursive act of inscription.
We are not passive observers. We are specks within specks. Chalk marks on the infinite blackboard. Writers of the cosmos.
Contributor Prompt: Add Your Speck
🟣 What is your white speck—your genesis insight?
💗 What pink layer of significance do you bring to the archive?
🔵 What blue relational logic connects your speck to others?
🌈 What multiverse of meaning do you imagine?
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