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Big Ideas: Scale

Writer's picture: Halloran ParryHalloran Parry

A painting in the art nouveau style of a tomato with a partial ring of tomatoes around it. On the left there are marigolds and a ring of lady bugs. A jumping spider is in the top right corner
The first of my pieces for my collaboration with Mollie's Organics.

The newsletter is taking a turn this year. Definitely for the longer, hopefully for the better. If you have friends who enjoy this type of long form content, by all means forward this email to them. The more people we have on board, the better.


I've been reading "Elements of a Durable Civilization" by Stewart Brand. He talks about the need to think in large time scales, the need to think of ourselves as good ancestors, working toward a better world for future generations. I think he's right and I take that obligation seriously. My motto is "big ideas, good stories, great art." In 2024 I spent most of my effort on the "great art" piece, with a bit of a nod to "good stories" (so far unreleased) and this year I'm tackling big ideas.


Stewart Brand, in his essay, introduces the idea of Pace Layers; i.e. "elements of civilization organized according to their rates of change." As an artist, I contribute to the Culture layer and I intend to leave it better than I found it.


Halloran's Maxims of Culture

1. Art is better than no art.

2. There is no 2. Yet.


I'm here to make art, to make the world a better place by making art, and to bring other people along on that journey. Going forward I'll aim to publish this newsletter on a roughly monthly cadence. It will be longer and more substantial than in the past, hopefully to everyone's benefit.


News and Goings On


Firstly, I'm at a new studio! If you know me from previous open studio events, know that I'm no longer at Jingletown Art Studios. As of this month, my workspace is right down the street at the newly opened Chapman Street Studios. There's talk of us putting together an open house when we have more artists moved in, so watch for news of that.


Secondly, I'm quite pleased to announce that I'm collaborating with Mollie's Organics. Mollie's is a market garden and patisserie in Lafayette owned and run by a good friend of mine, Lynn Evans. Our launch party is March 23, 11-4pm at 3191 Diablo View Rd in Lafayette, CA. There will be art, garden seedlings and seeds, and some samples from her bakery. It's the first time I've done a collab like this and we're both very excited by it. Lynn and I both said goodbye to our tech careers last year in favor of making the world a better place. For her, it's crops and food. For me, it's painting.


I'll be attending the Fantasy Art Workshop Illustration Intensive in June. This is one of the highlights of my year. I've gone to every single one since the beginning and I always get some pretty stunning work out of it.


Finally, IlluxCon is once again in Reading, PA in October and once again I'll be in the evening showcase. It was an incredible experience last year and I have high hopes for this one. With any luck, I'll be giving another talk. And bringing some paintings you've never seen.


On to weightier matters.


My motto is "big ideas, good stories, great art" and this year I intend to do more with the "big ideas" part of that. So for this newsletter, I'm focusing on a single big idea I've been wrestling with on and off for a few years, and that is the concept of Scale.


One of the most memorably awkward moments of my life happened when I was ten and I marched into my classroom and confidently explained that it was impossible to walk across a room.


Never mind that this is demonstrably untrue, as my classmates were quick to show me.


What had happened was this. The previous night my dad had introduced me to Zeno's Paradox, a thought experiment from a few thousand years ago. Zeno of Elea announced to the world that it was, in fact, impossible to traverse a given distance -- such as, say, a room -- because in order to get to the other side, you first have to travel half way. And then half of that. And then half of that. And so on. And because space is infinitely divisible, there are infinite halves which means you'd have to go an infinite distance which humans, having finite lifespans, cannot do.


This was fascinating to ten year old me, but I faced several challenges when I attempted to get everyone as excited as I was. The first being that I had forgotten Zeno's name. The second was that I didn't know what a paradox was so that word never really took root in my brain either. Additionally, this was my first exposure to the infinite, and in particular the infinitely divisible, i.e. an infinity bounded by a finite quantity (the distance across a room). So when I walked into class the next day, all I remembered was that "some guy" had said you couldn't walk across a room. I didn't remember who, I didn't remember why, but I remembered the feeling that whatever "some guy" had said made a kind of sense and I enjoyed that feeling, that satisfaction of looking at the universe through a new lens and seeing it arrange itself according to an order that I hadn't previously known existed.


Anyway it frustrated me to no end that I couldn't share this with everyone, owing to the fact that I'd fogotten all the important bits.


Zeno used his paradox to "prove" that all motion is imaginary and none of us move ever and I imagine he faced much of the same skepticism from his colleagues as they all proceeded to demonstrate, I imagine with escalating levels of glee and ridiculousness, that whatever Zeno thought and whatever the math said, humans could still move across time and space.


The reason I bring this up is that high minded intellectualism needs to be grounded in real life.


I got my next real exposure to scale in college. I was an art major living with, if memory serves, a physics student and two electrical engineering students. We were all wrestling with reality in different ways but at the time physics and EE felt a bit more grounded, a bit more substantial, that conceptual art.


So, in an effort to fit in with the cool kids, I picked up Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne.


This is a great book. Thorne went on to win a Nobel Prize for his contributions to detecting gravitational waves, but I felt he should have won one just for being able to write a book about astrophysics for the common man. It was approachable. There was no math. There were diagrams and lucid, understandable explanations. Nevertheless, the few weeks I spent plowing my way through that book were difficult.


Black Holes and Time Warps is about astrophysics. It's about the universe. It's about stars and galaxies and black holes and causality and relativity and all the physics we had to invent to reason about things millions of light years away. Not miles, light years. Not hundreds, millions. It's a scale that's fundamentally incompatible with the human experience. Obviously we're not traveling to the nearest star to take measurements ourselves.


And yet we do know a lot about what's out there. We know about other stars, planets, solar systems, galaxies, comets. We know enough to predict their movements. We can estimate their distance from us. And we know it all because we measure various forms of radiation that these bodies emit. The earth (and everywhere else) exists in a steady gentle rain of subatomic particles, all of which came from somewhere and by measuring various attributes of those particles we can make some extremely informed guesses about what's going on millions of light years away from us. Or rather, what happened millions of years ago. All that radiation has to spend time getting to us, at which point the information it encodes is a bit out of date.


So, to sum up, we're reasoning about extremely BIG things (galaxies) by measuring extremely SMALL things (neutrinos, photons etc). And in this book, there's no in between. Nothing human scaled. You never get to a chapter that mentions inches or feet. This being physics, you wouldn't anyway, but you also don't run into meters or kilograms. You know, something manageable.


This is the fabric of reality we're talking about here. The system of the world from which all reality derives. You and I are here, where we are in this moment, because of a lengthy and complicated chain of events that nevertheless derives from, if you reach far enough back, to these foundational theorems and equations that Thorn and his buddies are busy studying and deriving.


So I spent a few weeks in a sort of mental fog, trying to absorb the implications of everything I was reading and also trying to convince myself that humanity mattered at all. It was clear, in a way it had never been before, that in the really grand scheme of life, the universe, and everything, we don't really matter. We're insignificant. Not even rounding error. I don't mind saying that my motivation to complete homework assignments suffered greatly during this time.


This is an inherent characteristic of scales. At any given scale, certain things are too small to affect the result and some things are too big to consider. Most of us deal in what I'll call "human scale" most of the time. We're thinking in feet, inches, days, years, pounds, and so on. Or their metric equivalents. This is a general order of magnitude in which we're comfortable. These units of measure relate to our day to day existence and we use them because we can reason about them and we can then reason about other things.


Human scale, of course, is variable. Tell a four year old that they're going to a theme park a year from now and it's incomprehensible. A whole year? That's a full quarter of their entire life to this point. Whereas, as we age, we become more comfortable with larger units of time.


There are some people and institutions thinking beyond the single human experience. Statistics deals in aggregates and probabilities in order to discern underlying trends. Most of us will have had the experience of being prescribed a medication that works 75% of the time on the basis that it's the most likely to work given what the doctor knows at this moment. Most of us will have had the experience, at least once, of being in the 25% of people for whom that medication doesn't work.


When numbers get big, the individual experience is no longer mathematically significant, and unfortunately that often means that the individual experience gets dismissed and ignored.


"A small number of customers are experiencing difficulties." This crops up in my life occasionally when the internet service dies or the power goes out and I have to check an outage map. Or when a software service I'm using fails somehow. Never fails. My internet dies, I go check the outage map, and everything looks fine in my area and somewhere there's a little asterisk saying that things are not actually fine for a small number of people. Viewers of this map are meant to believe that things are broadly ok.


And maybe, broadly, they are. But it turns out that when my internet goes down due to circumstances a) beyond my control and b) within the control of my ISP, I become a gargantuan misanthrope. I do not care in the slightest that everyone else is fine. I'm decidedly not fine and any efforts to convince me that this problem is "small" are going to come across as insulting and naive. This is, of course, a scale problem. My ISP is operating on a scale of millions of customers. 1 person among millions truly is insignificant, from a numbers perspective. I, on the other hand, am operating at human scale, i.e. me. And to me, I'm pretty important.


A consequence of the information age is a constant firehose of crap happening well beyond the scale most of us are used to managing. I know intellectually that a trillion is significantly bigger than a billion, but when national debt figures make the headlines, I don't generally stop to worry about the difference. It's all more money than I'll see in a thousand lifetimes so they're functionally the same.


But as in physics, even though these scales aren't human sized, they still affect us.


I think a lot about AI right now, and generative image models and LLMs and the training data they use.


I'm not aware of the concept of scale in terms of our legality. In general, if something is legal, it's legal no matter how many times you do it. If it's legal for me to hand copy a single image for the purposes of study, then it's legal for me to do that as many times as I want. And if it's legal for me to do it, the AI proponents argue, it's legal for the AI models to do the same thing, as many times as they want, despite the fact that I could never get to more than a few thousand copies no matter how hard I worked, and a web scraper can suck in millions of images in hours.


I look at that situation and and it's not a nice feeling. Scale is its own power source, and increasingly, it's one that individual humans can't compete on when going up against compute power. This is a fundamental reality that will only get more true and more pervasive in the future. And so I find myself wondering if we need to set guardrails around scale in order to maintain humanity. Because when things get big, the human factor drops out. And I don't want that to be the case.


My issue with scale is humanity. It's personhood. Whatever else happens in the universe, I'm still a person, and my existence still happens at human scale, and I don't want all of humanity to turn into a rounding error, because what's the point?


The flip side of humans being ignored as rounding error means that we can achieve a lot in those "rounding error" margins that have a great deal of impact for those people that get stuck there.


Mollie's Organics was created when its founder, Lynn Evans, got into gardening and realized that she could feed people with her crops. She decided to make that goal the centerpiece of her efforts. She grows organic crops, makes exquisite patisserie, and donates heavily to the local food bank. I am thrilled to contribute my art to advancing her efforts and thereby making a significant difference in the lives of our local neighbors who rely on institutions such as food banks to make it through the day.


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