Blacksmithing Process in Quantum Age

Blacksmithing Processes in the Quantum Age


The Quantum Age has its own understanding of blacksmithing, and its different than that of the Greek Age.  Quantum Age is grounded in the interpretation of the Copenhagen Experiment, of what is.  The handcraft and the machine craft processes of blacksmithing in the Quantum Age are a transformation of praxis.

Here we will explore Heideggerian question: what is the essence of technology? In the ancient age of Greek blacksmithing that Homer describes in his poems, was something different than Middle Ages and Quantum Age blacksmithing processes. The loss of old ways of experiencing blacksmith processes has something to do with the a correspondingly different way of interpreting and understanding the context of those processes.

No master blacksmith would assume blacksmithing in the Quantum Age is more advanced than blacksmithing in the Pre-Socratic Age.  Damascus steel sword-making in the Middle Ages was not less advanced than it is in the Quantum Age.  The essence of modern blacksmithing processes is not to be understood in some progress narrative! The essence of what we call blacksmithing processes today is within some quantum understanding of what is.

Heidegger (1977 QCT, p. 118), in the essay 'The Age of the World Picture' says technology process "requires an open sphere in which it moves."  What is it about the Quantum Age that provides an open sphere in which blacksmithing processes move?   Blacksmithing processes are projected within the quantum realm of what is.

For example, the carbon bonding of metals in forge welding processes, in the Quantum Age, sketch out in advance the manner in which carbon particles transform their alignment. Forge welding consists of heating two pieces of metal in the fire to just the right temperature, moving the pieces to the anvil, then striking a gentle blow of the hammer, to bond them together, before the metal on the anvil cools.  If the metal touching the anvil cools before the one above it, the difference in temperatures of the two pieces will result in a failure of the forge weld. There are other factors, such as impurities from the coal that get on the surfaces being bonded, temperatures not hot enough, or too hot, that destroy the metal itself, taking too long to move the metal from fire to anvil, not striking the blow properly, etc. Despite all these obstacles, the ancient blacksmith learned the forge welding process, where as the blacksmith in the modern age can just use an arc, mig, or tig welder.

Forge welding processes in the ancient Greek Age, in the time of Democritus (atomism), Heraclitus (flux), and Perimedes (what is just is) --- had an open sphere different than the Quantum Age. There was a different understanding of how forge welding worked as a process. Blacksmithing processes in the Greek Age are constituted in the open sphere of Nature's elements: fire, earth, water, air, and ether. The elements defined a "material corporeality" that was "always-already-knowns" (ibid, p. 119). The material corporeality has an essence with the Greek's disputed, between atomism, flux, and what is that is. 


In the Quantum Age, blacksmith processes have left Democritus' atomism, and Perimedes' what is, for the Heraclitus understanding of flux.  The process of forge welding depends upon the motion of particles and collapsing the wave motion.

The antenarrative (storytelling the future) was projected in the sphere of various elements in the Greek Age and in the sphere of particles, waves, and associated Observer Effect, Double Slit Experiment, etc. (For references and definitions of see Quantum Storytelling http://peaceaware.com/quantum/index.htm).

What is Blacksmith Art in the Quantum Age?

Blacksmithing in the Quantum Age is bestowing, grounding, and beginning a quantum blacksmithing art.

There is a certain momentum to this emergent quantum blacksmithing art.  It is from a future quantum wave function spiraling its way into the past and present. There is what Martin Heidegger (PLT 1971: p. 86) calls and unconcealedness as the folks doing and preserving blacksmith ort make an ontological difference in the art world.  A quantum energia interfuses with blacksmith metal art that is related to the destining of Being blacksmith art in the Quantum Age. With quantum physics, a new and essential blacksmithing art work arose as a potentiality. Heidegger (BT 1962/1996) has numerous examples of 'hammers' and 'hammering' throughout Being and Time, and even one about 'tongs.'

Thus beings are accessible in the surrounding world which in themselves do not need to be produced and are always already at hand. Hammer, tongs, nails in themselves refer to-they consist of-steel, iron, metal, stone, wood. "Nature" is also discovered in the use of useful things, "nature" in the light of products of nature. But nature must not be understood here as what is merely objectively present, nor as the power of nature" (Heidegger BT 1996, p. 66, section 70).

The Modern and the Postmodern Ages of blacksmith art are making room for quantum blacksmith art. Each age has its particular artistic task, and transports the blacksmith artists into a different artistic endowment.  Blacksmithing had its task in the time of Homer in the Greek Age, in the Middle Ages, in the Modern Ages of western capitalism, in the Postmodern Age, the Post-Postmodern Age, and the now in the Quantum Age. Blacksmithing art has changed with each era, but not in a succession of one era to the next. Rather, the blacksmithing of the early eras survives in some limited fashion. We no longer have the long years of apprenticeship and journeyman training of artists and craftspersons that occurred. 

OUR CHALLENGE: Can we identify the quantum blacksmith art movement?

Certainly Julian Voss-Andreae, who trained in the science of quantum physics and does metal sculpture, is a case example. His recent project combines a 1300 stainless steel units, using a computer to make the metal cuts, according to a quantum equation of the constructivist mathematical reality. He uses hammering and welding. An earlier work is of a protein structure without beginning and end. His Quantum Man sculpture stands in the Columbia Gorge. He attempts with his art to see the relation of Nature-world to the Quantum World.  Many of those buying and preserving his art (the preservers) are scientists (Voss-Andreae, 2011).

Julian Voss-Andreae Video | Appeared in episode: Painter Tom Browning, Quantum Sculptures with Julian Voss-Andreae, Thom Bray, actor and educator  |  JulianVossAndreae.com |

We are making a quantum leap in blacksmith art as this future becomes historical past and changes the art of blacksmithing in the present. Can we identify the leap. 

Quantum sculptor, Joshua Roebke, and former physicist also conveys quantum mechanics through sculpture works of art.

Greg Olson is making metal material stronger using quantum mechanics. 

While not all of the processes used in their art are doine by blacksmithing, many are. And they point the way to the future that is coming to blacksmithing art ahead-of-itself, in a founding movement. Heidegger (1971 PLT) identifies three modes of founding: bestowing, grounding, and beginning.

Bestowing is a mode of founding a future.  This is not the ordinary notion of time from past-present-future, or beginning, middle, end (as in narrative time or clock time). Rather, this is the future-ahead-of-itself bestowing a path back from the future to the past (changing history), and to the present (emergence).  It is a radical temporality, a quantum temporality in which space, time, and matter are bestowing a quantum relationship: spacetimemattering. As quantum physicist, Karen Barad (2003, 2007) puts it, in spacetimemattering there is an 'intra-activity' of [quantum] materiality and discourse. Here, I address storytelling as one of the important domains of discourse.  And I ook at blacksmith metal art as a kind of poetic-storytelling (a domain of discourse) that is 'antecedent' to oral and written (textual) discourse. The Modern age was based in a Newtonian matter-material physics (atomism). The Postmodern Age was all about making Being into text, intertextuality, and virtual textuality. Post-postmodern Age was barely a heartbeat.  The Quantum Age has been brewing for some time. For more on Quantum Storytelling in the Quantum Age see. http://peaceaware.com/quantum/index.htm

Grounding a mode of founding the upsurge of blacksmithing's earth element. Blacksmithing is alchemy, working the elements: earth, fire, water, air, and ether.  The alchemist blacksmith use the elements to create art.  Iron comes from the earth and is mixed and smelted with other earth elements. Coal comes from the earth. Fire and air with the coal produces the heat of the forge.  The water quenches or tempers the metal. The elements of earth, fire, water, air, and ether are "self-closing ground" (ibid, p. 75) on which blacksmithing art sculpture rests together, and already is as the earthly elements prevail in relation to human beings in the "unconcealedness of Being" (ibid, p. 75).  There is a projection of the future into the past and present, "drawn up from the closed ground" of the earth onto earth-ground (ibid, p. 76).  

Beginning  Besides the bestowing and grounding, there is at the same time a beginning. It is not the ordinary beginning of beginning-middle-end (narrative). Rather, this is a beginning defined as "a leap out of the unmediable" that "prepares itself for the longest time ans holly inconspicously" for its age (Ibid, p. 76).  

"A genuine beginning as a leap, is always a head start, in which everything to come is already leaped over, even if it is something disguised: (Heidegger PLT 1971: 76).

What is this quantum leap into the blacksmith art of the Quantum Age. What is the future that is being created by blacksmith art processes of creation and preservation?

Spiral-Antenarrative. An Antenarrative (Boje, 2001, 2008. 2011). is double meaning of 'ante' as the 'before' processes and trajectories, ante-to-narrative. and the 'bet' on the future making a transformation.  In linear- and cyclical-antenarrative, the 'bet' that is 'before- narrative coherence sets in is that the past will repeat into the present, and recur in the future (just the same as it was).  A spiral-antenarrative, on the other hand, does not repeat the same linear path, or the same cycle-stages of creating and preserving art.  A spiral-antenarrative is neither a straight linear-antenarrative path or a cyclical-antenarrative.   A spiral-antenarrative amplies or contracts differences, and it is the future-ahead-of-itself making a wave-function that collapses into the past and present. It is future-past-present, whereas linear- and cyclic-antenarrative momentum is past-present-future. For more on Antenarrative see What is Antenarrative?

The spiral-antenarrative of quantum blacksmith art serves to "thrust up the unfamiliar and extraordinary" while at the same time there is a downdraft of the "familiar and ordinary" (Heidegger PLT, 1971: 76).  The updraft of the spiraling-antenarrative is through a rift or conflict between the updraft and downdraft thrusts. Through the rift into that updraft there is a "grounding in the openness and the bestowing of a future to the  preservers. The rift is between the earth-fire-air-water-ether (earthly elements) and the world of work, equipment, supplies, and Nature. The Earthly elements are making their way grounding in the widest orbit, The downdraft into the familiar and ordinary is in tighter orbits around the center-draft. The spiral-antenarrative processes of the thingness of things in the path of caring, of the widest "orbit of the whole draft" (PLT, 1971, 130) turns to the unshieldedness of the inner ♥-space of our worldly existence: "inward the true interior of the heart's space" (p. 130).  For more on the spiral-antenarrative up and down drafts, please see Heart-of-Care Life Paths page

Heidegger Abbreviations:

BT Heidegger, M. (1962). Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. 1996 Stanforth.  
BT Heidegger (1996). Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. State University of New York Press, Albany NY.
HCT Heidegger, M. (1992). History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Originally, 1925.
PLT Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter.  NY: Harper and Row.
QCT Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt. NY: Harper and Row. The Turning; The Word of Nietzsche: "God is Dead"; The Age of the World Picture; Science and Reflection --- are essays in the QCT book.

Other References

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 28 (3): 801-831). On line at http://www.kiraoreilly.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/signsbarad.pdf
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative Methods for Organization and Communication Research. London: Sage.
Boje, D. M. (2008). Storytelling Organizations. London: Sage.
Boje, D. M. (2011). Storytelling and the Future of Organizations: An Antenarrative Handbook. London: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2012). Reflections: What does quantum physics of storytelling mean for change management? Journal of Change Management, accepted 7/22/2011, waiting to appear in print in 2012.Click here for pre-press pdf.

Voss-Andrea, J. (2011). Quantum Sculpture: Art Inspired by the Deeper Nature of Reality. Leonardo,
 February 2011, Vol. 44, No. 1, Pages 14-20.