On Entropy

Roger Caillois's example of entropy is simple: hot and cold water mixing together to settle into a uniformly tepid blandness,' Robert Smithson's is only somewhat more complex. To explain entropy he asks his reader to imagine a sandbox filled on one side with white sand and on the other with black. A little boy begins to run around the enclosure in a clockwise direction, kicking up the sand as he goes and mixing together dark grains with light. He is then told to reverse his course and run counterclockwise. This will certainly do nothing to undo the monement toward uniformity and re-sort the two colors into separate fields. As his legs continue to churn, the process of entropy will, irreversibly. only progress and deepen.


- Rosalind E. Krauss