One Minus One

One Minus One begins with a laser strike against a large LED sphere. The strike is brief, directional, almost nothing — a particle of light spent in an instant. Yet that act is the catalyst, the first domino, for the rest of the work: waves of color propagating across the surface, sound building in the room, atmosphere thickening into a volume.

The title states the piece's logic algebraically. One Minus One is, on one reading, cancellation — the strike spends itself, the equation returns to zero. At the same time, it is conversion: 1 meets -1, the same quantity in opposite sign, transforming without loss. To convert is to cancel; to cancel is to convert. The laser is destroyed in becoming the wave, and the wave is everything the laser was not — slow rather than fast, wide rather than point, lingering rather than instant.

The visual rendering of these wavelength behaviors is mathematical evidence confirming the spiritual suspicion that nothing is ever truly lost, only owed elsewhere in another form.