Around this time, I started becoming aware of the dichotomy of “process” versus “product”, specifically the value and power of the creative process versus the value and power of an end-product, the result of a process.

I began to appreciate understanding how things were made, as opposed to celebrating or valuing the end products themselves. It seemed to me that art was defined as much by its intentions or goals, not just the shape of an end product.

Within my growing understanding, process and product exist within a spectrum that ranges between what could be  termed as “art” or “craft”. An object could be described as being more to one end than the other, or somewhere in the middle as a mixture of both art and craft.

For example, two individuals could create a teapot. If one of those creators makes a beautiful, functional teapot that’s purpose is dedicated to serving tea, then that process of creating it may be considered to be located more on the side of craft than art. But if the teapot, through its appearance, materials, or the conditions in which it was created, creates a new form or an innovative interpretation that’s not been seen before, or makes a political or social statement beyond its expected functional role, it’s creation may be considered an artistic statement.

So, using that analogy, I struggled to equate craft with the celebration of objective end-products, and to equate art with distinctive processes that could change the meaning of their significanct.

When Magritte painted a picture of a pipe and labelled it “C’est ne pas un pipe”, he took us outside the historically representational role of painting, to make us see it instead as just a message painted on a surface. The representation was not the same as the object.

Magritte’s statement happened in a world where photography, film-making, and all of science was expanding our ability to perceive the world at different scales of space and time. That one statement from Magritte changed a piece of painted representational craftwork into a challenging statement about what we should accept as representing reality.

I soon accepted that reality was not an absolute, objective experience, and could be different for each of us in our own way. Reality was subjective, not objective.

In one of his lectures, our Dean of Education Tom Hudson had said that the molecular structure of the table in front of him was changing thousands of times per second. The idea that a solid object was actually always vibrating at the molecular level was a fascinating and challenging proposition to me, but I soon became comfortable with the idea of unseen, vibrational energies in the realm of physics. Radio requency was familiar idea to me, along with the idea that video and television “paint” their images sixty times each second. It’s just our slower, analog perception that makes flickering film frames and video scan lines into complete images.

So computers creating images on a screen in real-time meant to me that even when the image wasn’t moving or changing its shape to the eye, it was still dynamic, existing in a constant state of being redrawn sixty times per second by millions of exchanges of electrons that happened millions of times more rapidly that that.

So to me, because every object could be framed as a collection of molecular vibrations, everything became dynamic and part of interconnected processes, from the atomic level up to the level of human perception. Nothing was static or immutable, and everything was actually part of the same processes. We were just a necessary part of the process of perception; the integration of signals to complete a reaction and form an idea.