In this series I start with 2 wood panels and I set up a simple system of autocatalytic processes, consisting of a creation, a destruction and a maintenance process that I execute consecutively in subsequent iterations over and over again.

In each iteration I start with the creation process in which I paint a portrait on the first wood panel, on top of the result from the previous iterations.

In the destruction process I scrape down the creation with a palette knife.

In the maintenance process I use the scraped down paint and put it onto the second wood panel creating another portrait. This is one complete cycle of iteration.

I execute the iterations on a daily basis. All creations are vanishing by destruction, and all destructions are vanishing by new creations, while the maintenance process accumulates all the memories. The creation is an illusion, the destruction is an illusion, the maintenance is an illusion too although with grave consequences. While creation and destruction play their games together and fight and love in the reflector light, maintenance takes all the consequences and keeps all the memories and the remnants of the interaction of the other two. The maintenance takes on itself the layers upon layers, the used paints and ideas and heartbreaking destructions. It’s not about creativity and fire and momentum, it is about bookkeeping. Tangible and practical. Boring and low level. But this is the illusion of maintenance. Maintenance is the real world. I embrace it and love it. There is emerging an entity here that has qualities and properties that its constituent processes do not have individually.

I took the inspiration for this series from the observation that many things in reality are the consequences of endless repetitions of simple processes. Take for example the ribosomes, or any bimolecular machine in our cells, those tiny machines or I would say beings, are executing processes over and over again, in repetition, catalysing and influencing each other in intricate networks. Out of these processes emerges the human cell, which is an entity that satisfies properties and has qualities that its underlying constituents do not have individually. But then those cells self organise again themselves into higher level structures and similarly to their constituents, they also execute processes in endless repetition, catalysing and influencing each other, so that we get our organs and other functional units of our body. And then we can continue this higher and higher level of scale, or lower and lower level of scale. It's all the same.

When we reach our mind, we see these autocatalytic processes there as well, because we all have our little personalities in our heads, that are triggered in different situations and play out like a pre recorded tape. How many times we catch ourselves in reacting the same way, or saying certain things, or doing certain things following the same patterns. We tend to think ourselves as individuals, as some-one. But in fact we are an intricate network of these personality processes that play out automatically. If we look closely into these processes, the illusionary some-one, the individual is hardly found anywhere. So again there is an emergent being here that I experience as being myself that satisfies properties and has qualities that its underlying processes do not have individually.

And again we can move to even higher scales, above human levels, and look at emergent beings like corporations, cities, global events and we see again their constituent processes, and how they are repeating and executing in endless repetition, influencing and catalysing each other.

In all scales of reality we see these emergent beings growing out of lower level processes and having qualities and properties that its underlying constituents do not have individually