Ecosystems Of Wrongdoings

How Entropy teaches that where there is rot, there is potential.

THE HOUSE OF ME:

Somewhere inside of me, there is a house on a hill that used to be someone. The house was built to fit a purpose that it doesn’t fulfil anymore. Its occupants have moved out and it struggles against its foundations to keep the heat in. Mould spores float and bounce into each other within its borders. Sitting without use, the house becomes hollow. It misses what it once was. Just a shell, is the rot all that shapes it now? Where are the boundaries between the rot of its future, and the house it still remembers being. Blinded by a yearning for purpose and getting sicker, the house can’t see what it’s already becoming.

Just like within the house, time changes and erodes parts of ourselves. Our purpose in life changes; we get ill, we get better. Our negativity warps up us like wood rot in the cellar. The world around us is “dense with things left behind,” and so are we, so how can we begin to put it all back together. How do we begin to preserve the parts of ourselves that we are losing? Mould is uncontrollable and expanding, shouldn’t I be finding a way to clean it all off before it can take over me? Shouldn’t I have found it by now?

This essay explores themes of entropy and decay, looking at the spaces between preservation and rot, as well as applying this to concepts of the body as a personal landscape. Different schools of thought on preservation, as well as digital decay and compression will be looked into, helping to shape and frame our understanding of our body, and the art all around it.

PRESERVATION — HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL:

My childhood home must be over 70 years old by now, and it is only getting older. The walls have seen so many different occupants with so many different lives. They have been painted so many different shades of white, and have faded into several more. Eventually though, people will stop moving in. Eventually, my childhood house will be condemned. We often look to restore or preserve buildings of significant historical importance, and what building could hold more of this to me than my childhood home? Will my memories still shine the same under the rubble the ceiling will eventually cave into?

When we look at my house now though, at the shed in the garden that despite being too unsafe to really use, is still standing, we can almost understand it as “a vessel of sorts” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.1). It holds both the sentimental memories of childhood, and the architectural memories of its original blueprints. In the state it is in now, we can see this shed as half empty, or half full.

“The school of half empty” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.3) would perhaps see my childhood shed as a “threatened object, its significance gradually eroding as its condition deteriorates.” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.3). The more the metal roofing starts to corrode, the higher the threat that the sheds memories will be hollowed out, removing the ascribed “meaning of the structure”(DeSilvey, 2017, pg.2). In this way, we can see decay as loss, the shed no longer a shed anymore, just a pile of rubble and material. Loss is hard, we want to be able to fix and freeze things of importance in time for as long as possible, to keep it for use, for performance, to fit original purpose. Preservation is about upkeep and holding things still. The problem with this, is that preservation is also “the result of ongoing work” (Owens, 2018, p.5), it requires people, commitments, resources. “The work is never finished” (Owens, 2018, p.22), and time, unlike people, is unrelenting. It will win eventually. I build scaffolding all around the base of my ribs, under constant upkeep and construction, but rot grows faster, binding.

Another way we can look at the shed is as half full. With this view, we see change as an opportunity for new meaning, and something that should be embraced and left. We don’t use the shed anymore, it is unsafe, but since it stopped performing its original purpose, it has become “caught up in a variety of processes” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.2&3), such as the “spontaneous colonisation” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.2&3) of “opportunistic plant and animal species” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.2&3). The storage shelter now becomes a home, a home for rats, for spiders and for weeds that pop up among the cement tiles. In its process of decay, it becomes more full than ever. In this way, we can also see decay as new life. Change is inevitable, and we shouldn’t take measures to fight it. Preservation can be perhaps seen as unnecessary. The problem here is that although new purpose lasts for a while, eventually, there is nothing left. The animals die, the roof caves in and begins to rot, any significance or purpose the building once had is not written over anymore, it has rotted into the air too.

ENTROPY & POTENTIAL:

Regardless of the position on preservation taken, the house, in its current state, sits in entropy. The term entropy is usually applied as a “shorthand invocation of a state of increasing disorder, chaos, or disorganisation”(DeSilvey, 2017, pg.10). Definitions of entropy can vary widely, as in some contexts, more priority can be given to the idea of disorder. However here, we are applying the idea of entropy as a measurement, measuring the “multiplicity of potential arrangements of matter within a given system” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.10). Systems with a higher range of potential outcomes or configurations are described as “existing in a state of high entropy.”(DeSilvey, 2017, pg.10). If we were to apply this idea to a living animal, there are only a small set of possible arrangements for limbs and parts, whereas in a decaying animal, there are many more configurations for the arrangements of these parts, and so many more endless options for the direction of the rotted parts to flow and mould. Therefore, a decaying animal would be in high entropy as its “multiplicity is higher”(DeSilvey, 2017, pg.10) over that of a living animal.

Within the context of buildings, a “conserved structure expresses a limited set of potential configurations” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.10&11). For instance, the paint on the walls, the thatching on the roof, the stairs in place. A structure in active dereliction would have many more. The more that maintenance and repair is withheld from a structure, the higher the measure of the entropy within the structure itself, and the higher the uncertainty of its future.

SELF (ROT & HOUSE):

Since I can remember, I’ve been writing about the rot inside of me. Be it memories, illnesses or looping thoughts, the urge I have for decay feels palpable and glugging within me. We all live through endless mutations and adaptations, surviving through the transformation to different versions of ourselves. We build on top of our previous versions as we simultaneously lose them. We are always a melting pot of rot and rebuilding.

With all this change, it is easy to just see my body as a vessel, a flesh house to whatever ideas and feelings are wanting to grow within it at any given time. It is constantly under redecoration and all that stays the same is the blueprints of a body, even my skin cells are completely new after seven years, a replica of a replica inside of myself.

My experiences with gender only seek to continue this idea, feeling an incongruence and uncomfortability with my exterior. Dysphoria has led to an discordance between myself, as flesh and bricks, and myself, as ideas. My body has become a foreign vessel to me, just insides — pink, organic, voided planes. I sit in the house of me. The house of me is rotting and moulding and rebuilding.

I follow these ideas within my artistic practice, using tools of world building and narrative to explore my unconscious shames and desires, held by small creatures within me, as they travel through the landscape of myself. My creatures are are monstrous and grow like ugly mould out of the shame I push down deep inside the cracks in the floorboards of my ribs. They grow out of the stuff unprocessed, unpreserved, rotting within me. I now have an infestation of ants. If this mould is a disease, will it grow out of control? If this shame is a parasite, will it eat the host? In my art, my creatures travel through the transitory spaces within me, voids where decay has left nothing, rooms where there used to be something, but, like a half-life, the potency of that something has began to dull.

Everything sits in entropy. Even before it rots, (which everything always is), it was always on its way to becoming rotted. My creatures, like me, are always travelling on their way to becoming something else, always eroding away the past behind them as they head towards potentiality. They walk through entropy, through the middle of stages and through my body, where boundaries are in flux, eroding at one end and growing at another, like a field picking up different weeds across the seasons as it lets go of others. The corroding copper roofing around my brain flowers new green and blue hues and the creatures living there are watching the process with excitement. High entropy leaves room for so many possibilities and options. I want potential in me.

ART & LOSSY COMPRESSION:

An issue I often run into in my practice, is that the world I am creating as art, often loses information or becomes less clear of an idea when it’s on paper compared to how it exists in my head. It often feels like my world has been placed through a meat grinder and although all the old pieces are there, it feels less whole than before. Perhaps a better way to describe it would be to compare it to how your voice sounds different through a radio, or how your memories look different to photos taken on an old phone.

Just like organic matter, information decays too. Whether it be from link breakage, bit rot, or heat warping, “software cannot preserve anything. Software cannot be a repository in itself”(Owens, 2018, p.4). It cannot save the artifacts it produces. I can’t paint my world to prevent it wilting as my world is never quite present enough inside of the paintings. It has been condensed.

A compression artifact is a piece of media that includes often noticeable distortions. Compressed files are smaller than uncompressed files, like a painting is smaller than a world. Information is put through a systematic grinder, “removing some of the information in the file”(Owens, 2018, p.48). Two types of compression include lossless compression and lossy compression. In the case of lossless compression, redundant or identical information is removed in favour of storing grouped values. “Red pixel, red pixel, red pixel”(Owens, 2018, p.48), could become stored as “3 red pixels”(Owens, 2018, p.48). Lossy compression, on the other hand, decides and removes what information it deems as irrelevant, creating artefacts such as JPEG’s MP3’s and MPEG’s that sound or look slightly more distorted and lifeless. Artifacts are produced as compression algorithms are often unable to discriminate between the loss of information subjectively unimportant, and those that could be seen as objectionable to the user.

Just like a JPEG is to a memory, my art feels to my concept — a flat window. My ideas are compressed down and the gap between brain to art is too spacious sometimes, the information decays along the road. My art becomes an artifact of the world inside of me, rather than fully encapsulating the world itself, an artifact to something within me that does not exist, and can’t cross the void fully to become tangible. This leaves behind a lot of feelings of loss that sits deep in my art and creates a lot of frustrating, seemingly solid boundaries that bar my world into non-existence. However, through this gap, through this middle stage of decaying ideas, we can see something beautiful forming out of the loss and blurring of intention. Immersion isn’t always lost, for our brains as an audience always seek to fill in these gaps. Losing the understanding of original intention, can leave an audience with varying levels our own forms of access to a piece. We set up a new world with intentions of our own creation and we look at the piece through own own lenses of experience. Like animals moving into an abandoned farm house in the winter, we build our own bridges of meaning to the landscapes we view.

FOLKLORIST PRESERVATION (LOSS IS PART OF IT):

Something else that embraces this loss of intention, and the beauty of morphing immersion is folklorist thought. Folklorists often hold the idea that “when folklore becomes fixed in a medium, it loses something of the cultural vibrancy that exists in how it mutates and varies”(Owens, 2018, p.22). Although folklore is often minimised down into tales and myths, folklore also values and observes societal traditions, colloquialisms, songs, handmade crafts and superstitions. “Folklore is about the logic and meaning of the everyday and informal” (Owens, 2018, p.22), and this often changes heavily, and so, folklorists seek to “trace how they emerge and change to fit the needs of a given time”(Owens, 2018, p.23).

Time is fleeting and we cannot keep something stagnant forever, to do so would only dull its relevancy to the present time. With an understanding that things are often temporary, we can start to “protect the things that matter the most”(Owens, 2018, p.8). It starts to be about care. Art is all about care. Art is all about this selective care of what we wish to preserve on paper, and what we want to morph it into. It embraces this decay of information, allowing it to take the shape of something newer. “We’ve never saved everything. We’ve never saved most things.”(Owens, 2018, p.8). When we “accept and embrace the archival sliver”(Owens, 2018, p.8) of what we can save, we can tend to these things with care. In this way, folklorist thought provides us with a third school of thought on preservation, in the middle of half empty and half full. This way involves priorities of care, and embraces the entropic, lossy compression of life, and its evolving societies. Folklore is preserved in a fluid and ever evolving way, as societies “refine and revise useful aspects of folk knowledge and carry that information forward through the daily life and practices of people”(Owens, 2018, p.22&23).

A term I often refer to that I think encapsulates this idea within the self is ‘personal mythology’. Personal mythology can be seen as recurring symbols and stories we use within our art, that become a representation for certain parts of ourselves, and become a tool to understand ourselves better. Artist Laura Benson comments that she thinks “anyone who is collecting images, stories or symbols — ones they made themselves or otherwise — is creating their own personal mythology in a way” (LVL3, 2022). Just like in folklorist preservation, themes and symbols are kept alive and fresh, taking root and growing out in so many different directions like ivy, meaning different things to different viewers. I cannot push every pixel of thought out onto a canvas or into an audiences head. Recurring symbols and systems of meaning create a language that an audience can breathe new life into, in a similar process to what my creatures do within me, filling in the gaps of decay. The art is in high entropy due to its compressed nature, and it now has the potential to be given life in so many new, beautiful ways.

HOPE IN SOFTER POTENTIAL:

I often wish to be so much more than a body. I think if I could preserve it all and become a perfectly formed theatre, if I could just freeze myself there, maybe everything would stay fine. Maybe if I could just be nothing, if I could rot into the expanse, if no animal could curl up and make a home in my ruins because even my wooden foundations are no more, maybe I could find some quiet. But, entropy is binding, the theatre seats get less comfy after every performance, there is litter on the floorboards and I see none of myself reflected back at me in the void. In a softer form of preservation, we see entropy turn rot into something new. We do not have to lose it all. We can preserve the pieces we like, and let decay bring the rest new forms of shine. This essay in itself is a form of soft preservation — a reminder to myself to sit in the middle of the entropy and to step away from the two extremes that push and pull at me.

In the center of it all, the entropy house inside of me shows the significance and progress of being caught in the middle. Before movement, it is just the structure of a house, and after it all, the house is gone. How lucky it is to be sat inside ourselves in the middle of stages. How lucky we are to feel the boundaries of change lapping like waves at our outlines. How lucky to be the house, to get to see so much life and change within ourselves, so many different pictures on the walls. After all the anguish of upkeep, I look to the tense gap that sits between “abandonment and attention” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.21), and “I try to imagine what it might mean to dwell there, and let things be unpredictable and permeable — not entirely known, or owned”(DeSilvey, 2017, pg.21).

Nothing is ever only one thing, it is always in the process of becoming something else. So are we. Perhaps we should aim to find a space to let potential shape our outlines with us, instead of curating ourselves sicker. “All things go somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms”(DeSilvey, 2017, pg.11). So perhaps we should aim to embrace this “process of devolution” (DeSilvey, 2017, pg.16), holding onto and embroidering the ideas we want to hold safe, so we can take them to these new places with us.

Invasive species are often the first to move into abandoned structures. They are opportunistic. My creatures are like weeds, maybe they can be a new form of life and purpose for me. The mould continues growing, creating an ecosystem from the wrongdoings of my past that eat at me regardless of how much I try to cut it back at the root. Through weeds, I get the chance to start over again with new life. New shapes and patterns in the dirt can form. Perhaps we can aim to build from the rubble up, perhaps I can make something out of the metal I find in the junk pile. By relinquishing a fear of decay, I can feel my boundaries in flux, morphing like myth. I can see clearer which parts I want to salvage and take with me — which parts to share with the new creatures making a home in me. I can move towards cohabitation. I’ve been wanting some company for a while. With the weight of my old life rotted off of me, I see ahead of me so much more potential and options than ever before. Without the weight, I feel so much clearer to aid my direction. Fungus grows in the shape of something new, spelling out a laced future for me. I hope to bring my joy with me.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

DeSilvey, C. (2017) Curated decay: Heritage beyond saving. University of Minnesota Press. LVL3, (2022) Artist of The Week — Laura Benson, LVL3. Available at: https://lvl3official.com/laura-benson/ (Accessed: 06 January 2026). Owens, T. (2018) The theory and craft of digital preservation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.