Perceiving Reality The Enthalpy of Existence

Abstract

Perceiving Reality — The Enthalpy of Existence traces a decade long investigation by British artist Alexander James Hamilton into the behaviour of light, matter, and perception as thermodynamic systems. Spanning the Siberian projects Oil + Water (2013–2016) and Empirical Research & Evidence (2021–2023), the work unites scientific observation with aesthetic consciousness. Through analogue photography and sustainable material practice, Hamilton visualises entropy, equilibrium, and environmental change as intertwined conditions. The resulting corpus proposes that perception itself functions as empirical instrument: a form of energy exchange in which to observe is to participate in creation.

Ptolemy, 2013.

1 · Genesis — The Enthalpy of Fusion

When Alexander James Hamilton began the Oil + Water experiments along the Yenisei and Kama rivers between 2013 and 2016, travelling such great distances not to capture the environment but to perceive reality through its potential for physical transformations. Working at –50 °C, he drilled through metres of ice to reach the flowing current beneath. From that hidden layer he drew both the river water and the crude oil he needed, both extracted from the same ancient strata. Within large timber forms, measuring 140 cm across (the largest size he could manage to move while working alone) he poured the water that had been warming inside a fisherman's hut he had himself dragged into the middle of the river ice flow, and, in a controlled sequence, introduced pure crude oil. The cube froze from the outside inward: its outer shell hardening like tempered steel while the inner core remained liquid, expanding under pressure, that pressure created heat, that heat created gasses until those gases erupted and waxy secretions bled from the oil within.

Dark Matter, 2013.

Each form became an ossuary of energy, a pure equilibrium of two materials that should not, will not mix, somehow held together in a unique state just long enough to be seen and photographed. Hamilton used large-format film plates, with lenses pressed against the freezing structure, exposing them to the internal glow. The resulting images are literal records of the enthalpy of fusion, the precise energy required for matter to change from one state to another.

The iridescent gradients that appeared from petroleum blues dissolving into ice with cream like whites, they recall Turner’s turbulent seas and the meditative radiance of Rothko’s Seagram panels, yet these hues were not painted; they were the measurable optics of conflict between immiscible elements. Each exposure functioned as a frozen chromatograph, translating environmental data into image.

As Albert Einstein observed, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” In Hamilton’s cubes that illusion becomes tangible. The camera does not depict the world; it witnesses the persistence of its physical laws. What he captured was not just oil or water, but the visible threshold between them, the narrow moment when opposition becomes harmony.

Constellation, 2015.

2 · Observation and Isolation

Hamilton spent successive winters in the Siberian forest pursuing these observations, each expedition lasting 3 months at a time. Isolation was both method and necessity. At –50 °C, chemicals froze mid-reaction; the air itself felt viscous. Each plate demanded hours of preparation and seconds of light. “You learn quickly that endurance is also a form of measurement,” he has written. “The body records data as faithfully as these film plates.”

The solitary hut on the river became both laboratory and monastery. In that silence, every crack of ice was a data point, every breath an experiment in survival. His approach echoed Faraday’s and Tyndall’s nineteenth-century studies of refraction and phase change, yet where they sought neutral proof, Hamilton sought perceptual evidence—a direct experience of the physics at work.

From an art-historical vantage, Oil + Water stands in dialogue with the Land Art movement, but where Richard Long or Hamish Fulton traced distance through walking, Hamilton allowed the landscape itself to inscribe the image. The river became both subject and instrument. Nature was not represented; it performed.

Galaxy, 2016.

Robert Smithson wrote that “the artist can make the trajectory from order to disorder visible.” Hamilton’s plates literalise that trajectory: thermodynamic decay rendered as radiance. To perceive reality here is to perceive energy itself. Its expenditure, its brief equilibrium, its inevitable loss.

Spawn Preparation, 2014.

3 · Return — Empirical Research & Evidence

When Hamilton returned to the exact same river locations between 2021 and 2023, the experiment refused to repeat. Average temperatures had risen more than 25 degrees above previous recordings.

Isolated and alone he was unaware that his experience was not at all isolated, at the same time both Antartica and the North Pole were also experiencing staggering temperature rises alarming scientists globally and causing vast areas of historically stable ice shelfs to weaken and break away forever.

Along the frozen ice the cubes would no longer freeze fast enough to build the internal pressure needed; the once-violent phase transitions fell silent. No wax was secreted, no fractures formed.

The resulting series, Empirical Research & Evidence, became an inquiry into absence. The colours of Oil + Water had drained to greys, the surfaces traced only by delicate fractal interferences as records of what the environment had ceased to perform. Where the first project documented the transformation of matter, this one measured its inertia.

These desaturated plates recall Sugimoto’s Seascapes or Richter’s near-whites, but their restraint is empirical, not stylistic. The diminished contrast is data: a visible reduction of thermodynamic exchange. Empirical Research & Evidence thus operates as a control sample against Oil + Water—proof of systemic change.

As curator Manuel Fontán del Junco notes, “This is not an afterword but an experiment left to nature. What no longer happens can still be observed.”

The two series now form a closed loop of enquiry; fusion and exhaustion, tension and stillness, illustrating what Ilya Prigogine termed “dissipative structures,” systems that sustain temporary order by exporting disorder. Hamilton’s practice makes those structures visible. Perceiving reality, in this sense, means acknowledging that even stasis contains motion, that equilibrium itself is a form of decay.

Plate 01176, 2022.

4 · Entropy as Witness

Every photograph Hamilton produced in these works records energy’s movement toward equilibrium. Entropy is not metaphor but behaviour. Each analogue exposure functions as a small open system in which light, chemistry, and gravity interact until a fleeting balance crystallises on film. The photograph becomes a micro-laboratory of thermodynamic empathy.

The circular formations within many plates echo Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic studies and Sachiko Kodama’s ferrofluid patterns, yet Hamilton’s purpose remains contemplative rather than analytical. His images ask what it means to witness energy performing its own choreography of order.

From Smithson’s “entropy made visible” to Olafur Eliasson’s climatic light installations, artists have treated perception as a reciprocal exchange. Hamilton extends this lineage through direct analogue experiment. Every act of seeing, every photon absorbed by the emulsion, alters the system. Einstein wrote, “Out of the multitude of sense experiences we form concepts and attribute to them the meaning of the bodily object.” Hamilton reverses the sequence: the object is the experience; perception generates its own evidence.

To perceive reality here is to accept that observation itself is a creative act, an exchange of energy between world and witness. Entropy is not the negation of order but its engine; attention & method is the instrument by which it is measured.

Plate 00389, 2022.

5 · Material Ethics and Provenance

Hamilton’s empiricism extends into the ethics of making. Each print is produced on bamboo-fibre conservation paper, a regenerative material whose microstructure absorbs the emulsion like sediment binding to a riverbed. Frames are hand-charred cedar, preserved by the Japanese Shō Sugi Ban technique, where fire becomes its own safeguard.

These material decisions are not aesthetic flourishes but extensions of the same law that governs his imagery: the circulation of energy without waste. The studio functions as a micro-ecology in which chemistry is reclaimed, materials reused, and process equals principle. In this closed loop, the photograph ceases to depict sustainability, it performs it.

Hamilton’s practice aligns with Agnes Denes’s Wheat-field – A Confrontation (1982) and El Anatsui’s monumental re purposings, yet it remains rooted in empirical observation. Each object is proof that ethics and physics share a common language. In creating responsibly, he continues the act of perceiving reality through the behaviour of matter itself.

Plate 00855, 2022.

6 · Seeing Reality

Across ten years of fieldwork, Hamilton’s enquiry has shifted from documenting material behaviour to investigating perception as a physical process. Both Oil + Water and Empirical Research & Evidence now read as two halves of the same experiment—one capturing transformation, the other recording its decline.

In both, vision operates as measurement. Each exposure represents an energy exchange between observer and environment, akin to spectroscopy performed through consciousness. The results are aesthetic yet empirical, demonstrating that sustained perception can quantify truth.

From James Turrell’s perceptual chambers to Susan Derges’s river photograms, contemporary art has often treated seeing as experiment. Hamilton extends this tradition into physics itself, uniting moral and material law: observation as responsibility.

Here Teilhard de Chardin’s assertion that “the visible world is the invisible organisation of energy” finds concrete form. The same forces that fuse hydrogen into stars dictate the passage of light through Hamilton’s water and oil. His analogue film becomes a field where photons inscribe the universe upon its own surface.

Ultimately, Perceiving Reality emerges not as passive seeing but as participation. Each act of attention transfers energy; each image sustains a fragile equilibrium between physics and empathy. “Art,” Hamilton writes, “is the residue of attention applied without compromise.”

In an era dominated by simulation, his analogue camera restores perception as the rarest empirical instrument. It records not only the behaviour of light and matter, but the transformation of awareness itself, from observation to involvement, from data to understanding. To perceive reality, Hamilton suggests, is to enter it consciously, to become part of its ongoing experiment.

Plate 00221, 2023.

Author Note

Alexander James Hamilton (b. 1967) is a British artist whose practice explores water as both medium and philosophy through large-format analogue photography and sculptural installation. Over four decades he has exhibited internationally, combining scientific experimentation with environmental ethics. Working from his remote mountain studio in central Spain with his wife Anna, he continues to develop sustainable art systems that merge research, craft, and circular design.

Artist Alexander James Hamilton on the banks of the Yenisei River.

Quotations on the Subject of Perceived Reality

Scientists

1. “Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out, and minutely articulated.” — George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Science (1906)
2. “The fact that man produces a concept ‘I’ … does not prove that there must be any specific existence behind such a concept. We are succumbing to illusions produced by our self-created language, without reaching a better understanding of anything.” — Albert Einstein
3. “A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.” — George Wald (Nobel banquet speech, 10 Dec 1967)
4. “There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one’s nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence.” — attributed to Deepak Chopra
5. “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” — Albert Einstein
6. “Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take … certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression … and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of the bodily object.” — Albert Einstein
7. “Quantum physics tells us that nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer. … It means that everyone sees a different truth because everyone is creating what they see.” — Neale Donald Walsch
8. “The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.” — Bernard d’Espagnat
9. “In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.” — Albert Einstein
10. “The analogy I like is this: imagine being able to see the world but you are deaf, and then suddenly someone gives you the ability to hear things as well – you get an extra dimension of perception.” — Albert Einstein

Philosophers

1. “What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. … Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.” — John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In
2. “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” — William Blake
3. “There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
4. “The visible world is the invisible organisation of energy.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (often cited)
5. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” — Oscar Wilde
6. “One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one’s perception of it;… one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.” — Tom Robbins
7. “All perception is coloured by emotion.” — Immanuel Kant
8. “To view the world sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of the eternal) is to view it as a whole—a limited whole.” — Thomas Nagle (on Spinoza)
9. “Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans… If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities?” — Philip K. Dick
10. “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Artists

1. “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” — Bertolt Brecht
2. “Every perception of colour is an illusion… we do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.” — Josef Albers
3. “For me, abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. I’ll go further and say that abstraction is nearer my heart.” — Josef Albers
4. “Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.” — Georges Braque
5. “The artist has one function—to affirm and glorify life.” — W. Edward Brown
6. “Art is not to be looked at. Art is looking at us. … The content of art is visual formulation of our relation to life.” — Josef Albers
7. “We see ourselves and also the surrounding reality anew.” — Li Wei (on his Mirror Series)
8. “In my mirror-paintings … the viewer becomes part of the artwork.” — Michelangelo Pistoletto
9. “What we see depends on how we look; the eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” — Robertson Davies
10. “What we see depends on what we look for.” — John Lubbock (often cited by visual artists as well)