Manifesto
Meet C.A.T.S.:
Circular Aerial Temporary Sculptures
A ring of air costs nothing, belongs to no one, and asks nothing of the people who see it. It rises, it travels, it comes apart. In the few seconds it holds together, everyone in the field is looking at the same thing.
People love to see them. We have watched arguments stop mid-sentence. We have watched strangers point at the sky together. Whatever a person was carrying, they set it down for as long as the ring lasts — and some of them do not pick it all back up.
So we build the drums, and we go out at dusk, and we send sculpture into still air. Not to be kept. Only to be seen.
These rings have no monetary value. But they do make grown-ups giggle.
Sys.Log — Development
We're at Prototype VII
- Mk.VII3-ft circle. 6-in orifice. Kiddie-pool back.// current
- Mk.VIBox for a back.
- Mk.V“Umbrella Ella Ella Eh Eh.” Release mechanism: an umbrella. Did not work.
- Mk.IVGravity disaster.
- Mk.IIITemporary trashcan and plywood. Worked. Genuinely, reliably well.
- Mk.IIA bucket.
- Mk.ICoffee can.
- Mk.0Read Physics on the Fringe by Margaret Wertheim.
Footage of Prototype VII, in still air.
Lineage
Love to Jim Carter
Nothing here begins with us. It begins with Jim Carter, a gold prospector and garbage-hauler from Enumclaw, Washington, who spent a lifetime building smoke-ring cannons in his own yard and reasoning outward from what they showed him — that the ring holds itself together, that it is a thing and not a picture of a thing. He pursued that all the way to a physics of his own, the circlon, worked out in defiance of every institution that would not have him. We think he was a genius. We are, in the most literal sense, doing his experiment again.
Carter's circlon theory arrives as much through making as through argument. He drew and built his atoms — coils, hooks and rings rendered in colour and metal — and laid them out in a periodic table of his own devising, every element a mechanical object you could in principle hold, its place on the chart set by how the coils nest rather than by orbitals. Whatever one makes of the physics, the table is a genuine work of art: an entire material world drawn by hand, and beautiful the way obsessive, unsanctioned things are beautiful. His drawings and tables are archived at margaretwertheim.com. Go and look at them.
His work is set down with great care and great affection in Margaret Wertheim's Physics on the Fringe, an amazing book about outsider science and the people who will not stop looking. Read it. Then go build a drum.
Dispatch
We are just like Mount Etna
Mount Etna in Italy has broken records by spewing hundreds of volcanic vortex rings — often called smoke rings — at an unprecedented rate of up to 100 per day.
Testimony
Hear what the “people” will be saying
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“I had not spoken to my brother in nine years. A ring came over the fence, wobbled, and fell apart above the driveway, and we both laughed at the same time. I called him that night.”
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“I came to that lot angry the way I had been angry for a long time. The ring went by me at shoulder height, perfectly quiet. I could not find the anger again afterwards. I have looked.”
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“My daughter asked whether it was alive. I said no. She said it was, for about four seconds. She is right and I was wrong, and I think about that most days.”
