Thompson told his hometown newspaper, the Louisville Gazette: “I cannot find a place nor category in which to put my paintings nor a name to call them.” His refusal to categorize or identify his work strikes this viewer as being an act of defiance, and much more. What connects these very different artists is not their biography, however, but the feeling of separateness they inventively expressed in their work. I can think of only two painters in the last 50 years who accomplished so much in such an abbreviated period: Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) and Matthew Wong (1984–2019). Few artists since his death have had a similar outpouring and, not surprisingly, almost none of them have sustained it for more than a decade. During that time, he completed more than 1,000 paintings. This seemingly magical device could put us on the road to new, more efficient nanoscale machines, a better understanding of the workings of life, and a more complete picture of perhaps our most fundamental theory of the physical world.When Bob Thompson (1937–1966) died in Rome at the age of 28, he had been painting for eight years. Recently came the most startling demonstration yet: a tiny machine powered purely by information, which chilled metal through the power of its knowledge. Information is a real, physical thing that seems to play a part in everything from how machines work to how living creatures function. But what, actually, is information?Īs we have wrestled with the question over the years, we have slowly begun to realise it is more than an abstraction, the intangible concept embodying anything that can be expressed in strings of 1s and 0s. It is the currency of human understanding, our indispensable guide to navigating a complex world. We are surrounded by it, and more of it year by year.
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