James Drake

All thought reaches a point where the greatest challenge that it faces is to maintain diversity while pursuing unity. It seeks to find a pattern in life without compromising on the power of the unconscious, incidental, or even irreconcilable. While diversity without unity produces randomness, unity without diversity is lifeless. Drake’s work favors chance and its analytical cousin, the fragment, and often disdains the illusion of completeness. One of Drake’s abiding fascinations is in theoretical science, with its ability to summarize vast scales of space and time in a few precious glyphs of distilled inky logic. The shadows of the Manhattan Project (Drake is a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico) and its denizens are much in evidence in both the mechanical and mutant compositions found in his work. These include the blueprints of Fermi’s Chicago Pile-1 beneath Stagg Field, equations for the unitary evolution of quantum fields, an FMRI of his own brain, Turing machines, metamorphic beetles, and warring ants. Drake’s “algorithm” borrows much of its order from the long history of drawing, fragmenting graphite onto the edifices of science, and discovering combinations through recollection.

Works