May 2017 myself and Elisa got married in Virtual Reality as a pair of robot avatars, filmed by the BBC.
We decided to postpone our honeymoon, and instead hang around in South Wales enjoying summer. One Sunday afternoon I received a call from my Mum’s bestie, Jan, saying Mum had been taken into hospital having had a fall.
I rushed in, and sat with Mum all day while she was undergoing tests (all ok now, just in case you were wondering). During this time I began playing with an idea first introduced to me in 1998 in Costa Rica: that you cannot have ‘expectation’ without ‘disappointment’. It was probably on my mind as I’d been reading ‘Happy’ by Derren Brown around that time.
As I sat there with my book, I thought to myself “how would I show the idea of a concept inside another concept” as a visual.
I began with a square…
It made sense to add another square in the middle of the first one…
But seeing as the principle was for two concepts to contain each other, I felt I needed another square…
…which led me to add another square in the centre of that one…
Next was the leap – to connect ‘the wrong way’* the small squares to the larger squares on the opposite side.
*(or rather, that was probably not how I had connected ‘boxes’ beforehand)
Once one side had been connected, it was obvious to repeat the action on the other side…
That’s it!
When I got home I said to my wife, “How has no other human ever thought of this?”
Elisa said, “…or a chimp?”
