Negative Entropy (Stripe International Inc., Legal Department, Black and White, Hex)
Year: 2021
Medium: cotton, wood, acoustic baffling felt
Dimensions: 140 x 280 cm (55 1/8 x 110 1/4 in.)
Acquired from TARO NASU, 2022
The “Negative Entropy” series is Tajima’s representative work. Consisting of a composition with six patterns and referred to as “Hex,” this is one of the large pieces in the series. Multiple layers of meaning are interwoven in “Negative Entropy.” Firstly, as the title suggests, it is based on the difficult concept of “Negative Entropy” from thermodynamics. It seems that this concept was inspired by the famous quantum physicist Schrödinger’s controversial remark in his essay “What is Life?” where he wrote, “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.” Tajima created this work by recording audio at specific locations and visualizing the spectrogram images based on an analysis of the environmental sounds, which were then produced on a Jacquard loom. The chosen locations for her audio recordings were selected where things were produced. Tajima perhaps recognizes that the secondary sounds that occur in response to some productive activity in these spaces are in a state of disorder or high entropy, and that converting them into graphic form and fixing them as textiles is an act of conversion to lower entropy. Tajima’s creation of these works is nothing other than an external factor (energy) that was never supposed to intervene in the environment. She collects sounds chaotically dispersed in the space and converts them into the stable state embodied by a work of art. In other words, it leads the entropy of that space in a negative direction. The material used is mentioned as “acoustic baffling felt”, indicating the substitution of a material that absorbs sound for a work originating from the sound. The artist also often describes the series as an acoustic portrait, which could be understood as a kind of “aural depiction.” The visual aspect of this work is secondary, and its essence resides in the very fact that it addresses a subject that was captured aurally.
