CRIVMATIC
MATERIAL
A wholly original material —
a product of the will —
an absurd idea pursued until
the fictional demands of the creative process become physically real.
A wholly original material —
a product of the will —
an absurd idea pursued until
the fictional demands of the creative process become physically real.
A wholly original material —
a product of the will —
an absurd idea pursued until
the fictional demands of the creative process become physically real.
From within the refrigerator emerges an old broadcast: the February 21, 1997 episode of Coast to Coast with Art Bell describing “Mel’s Hole,” a supposed bottomless pit in eastern Washington. Locals have thrown garbage into it for years. Dogs refuse to approach it. Birds will not perch near it. Mel claims to have lowered 80,000 feet of weighted line without reaching the bottom. At one point, he dropped a refrigerator into the hole and never heard it land. Eventually, military personnel seized the land. When Mel resisted, he was told it would be easy to “discover” a drug lab on his property. The hole is now government territory.
The endlessness of Mel’s Hole is a potent symbol of the unknowable — a depth we cannot measure, and cannot ignore. The story strains belief. Yet Mel’s conviction, paired with Art Bell’s willingness to entertain the possibility, sustains its power. It keeps us wondering, wanting it to be real.
CRIVMATIC MATERIAL stands for this desire.
Crivmatic material is a wholly original material: a product of the will, an absurd idea obsessively pursued until the fictional demands of the creative process become manifest in physical reality. This material perpetuates itself inside the refrigerator and in the mind, in unison with thought itself.
Thought, like crivmatic material, cannot be halted. Reproduction may be slowed or altered — as in sleep or refrigeration — but it is never completely stopped, not even in death. It is the nature of the mind to generate thought, and from that thinking, action.
It has been done. It has taken shape.
Finally, action brings comfort to the self. Vaporous thought, previously trapped in the inexplicable channels of electric brainflesh, materializes in the physical world through action. It shimmers now before the eyes: alive, unkillable, quietly pulsing, expanding, and emitting a frequency capable of activating an entire repertoire of the senses.
CRIVMATIC MATERIAL exists at the narrowing junction between the human body and the machine, between absurd creation and rational output. It is a testament to the processes of the mind and the mechanical secretions of the body.
Though it appears alien and unearthly, it is not different from the regular discharges of an armpit, an ass, or a foot. Crivmatic material is the product of the body as much as it is the body. Its fluorescent and repeating forms resemble unfamiliar organisms and the burning force within them: a self-perpetuating battery inside a living machine.
Fuel is simultaneously produced and consumed.
The refrigerator, functioning as it does to keep things cool, preserves and protects the delicate constitution of crivmatic material. Under lowered temperatures, its surfaces glow with internal energy. Without coolant, expansion becomes unstable and potentially dangerous. While crivmatic material may exist outside controlled environments, it persists best within them.
Upon opening the refrigerator, one might ask how such an organized system of foreign objects came to exist and how it generates frequency through what appears to be an entirely new physics of transmission.
Each time crivmatic material appears — in the washing machine, in the toilet, on some aging Trader Joe's bananas, or suspended in air, weightless as dust — we are startled by its presence, yet comforted by the possibility it reveals.
The majority of crivmatic material assumes a core form: eight joined pieces of crivmatic particulate, two from each fluorescent strain. Though the structure remains consistent, no two specimens are identical.
Variations appear in surface, edge, width, height, volume, weight, proportion, opacity, rhythm, and arrangement, differences that suggest a deeper organizing principle at work.
This reproductive complexity — countless individual forms resembling one another — begins to describe a spontaneous tendency toward order at a higher level. How do individual acts of buying and selling coalesce into an economy? How do cells in a developing embryo become entirely distinct forms?
Nature repeatedly demonstrates how separate entities converge into unified systems. Crivmatic formations — ringed crivom, piped crivom, crivmatic crowns — grow together like neon mold: robust, internally illuminated structures composed of organized particulate.
They are so complex, and so far removed from complete comprehension, that the human mind, in its attempt to understand itself, cannot approach any final explanation.
And yet, deviation persists.
There are mutations. Off-scale eruptions of chaos. Moments when the mind destabilizes and crivmatic particulate forms entirely new configurations.
Part ordered.
Part irregular.
Never predictable.
These rare specimens, sometimes diverging even from the four core fluorescents, can be alarming. But they are also reassuring.
They show us that no energy is static. No thought is fully controlled. No system is ever complete.
Driven by a machine-like obsessiveness to know what is ultimately unknowable, science quietly surrenders to creative actions of the most absurd nature, and exposes its seeming triumphs as inadequate and forever incomplete.
Not needing to know, not needing to explain, art unfurls. Turning the very idea of the preposterous inside out, creative acts make way for a peculiar type of wisdom.