NYAB Event - Martin Brief “A Brief History of Time”

Martin Brief “A Brief History of Time”

Danese Corey

This event has ended.

This project is a handwritten version of Stephen Hawking’s famous book, “A Brief History of Time.”

It will consist of twelve pieces, one for each chapter in the book and is an exploration into the relationship between scientific and theological cosmology. as well as into how we use scientific and religious doctrines. Brief chose “A Brief History of Time” because it is one of the all-time best selling books on science and of course, because of the prominence of the author and his impact on our understanding of the universe. In addition, the title of the book (and project) is a humorous reflection on the artist’s name and his own work and process. Given the time involved in creating this series (an average of about 200–250 hours per piece), the project is a representation of the a not so brief of a period in his life.

Brief’s process began with an examination of the primary holy texts from the world’s three dominant monotheistic religions; the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an. He compared all of the words in these three books and assigned colors to them based on which of the books they appeared. If a word appears in all three religious texts it is gold; silver if it appears in two; and bronze if it appears in only one. This color system is then applied to Hawking’s book with the addition of another color, copper, for the words in Hawking’s book that are not in any of the three religious texts. As with most of Brief’s recent projects there is a blend of absurdity and logic and in this project, it mirrors the perceived conflicts between science and religion that are often played out in political and
cultural arenas.

The chaper’s are written on small (1/16” high) paper “tiles” (one word per tile) and these colored tiles are glued with a small space between, in straight lines onto a sheet of paper forming a rectangular shape, like a block of text on the page of a book. The result is a kind of mosaic in which the pattern is randomly determined by the synthesis of the color coding system derived from the religious texts and the order of the words used by Hawking.