Butterfly Effects

The title of mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s 1972 paper “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” nearly used a seagull instead of a butterfly. The change, suggested by Lorenz’s peers, to the more poetic imagery of the butterfly, is likely in reference to Ray Bradbury’s 1952 sci-fi short story "A Sound of Thunder.” In Bradbury’s story, the accidental (unscheduled) death of a single butterfly, in a meticulously planned dinosaur-hunting time-travel trip gone wrong, drastically alters the course of the future. The characters then spin into existential crisis after realizing the full weight of their actions. In his 1993 book “The Essence of Chaos” Lorenz defines The Butterfly Effect as “the phenomenon that a small alteration in the state of a dynamical system will cause subsequent states to differ greatly from the states that would have followed without the alteration” (204). I can’t help but wonder: what changes have resulted from the alteration of the name of the concept itself? Would Ashton Kutcher have still starred in a 2004 film if it was The Seagull Effect? Would I be writing about it now? 

I was thinking of rippling, of the potential chaos of small encounters, of the paralysis of unknowability, of cascading environmental crises, and of real possibilities of time travel, as I recently crossed a littered shoreline and waded into the calm waters of Lake Ontario one afternoon with my children. How to capture the efforts, the effects, the trust, of wading, into a meadow, into a body of water, into an unknowable future? In what way might deep-time, multi-sensory encounters be visioned, or as witness to the brief and utopic glimpses into the macro, the interconnected, the unraveled, the other-worldly, the blip in the endless, ancient, continuum?  

The handmade collages twins, webs, ripples, shifts, sounds and strange attractors, fluid flows, butterfly effects are a part of an ongoing study into imperfect symmetries, the utility of images and possibilities of alternative documentations of otherworldly, unseeable, or uncaptured interactions.