Details

Everything is a wave. Take a water wave. When we witness it, we are seeing light waves that bounce off the surface of the water towards our eyes. When we hear the waves crash, we're hear the sound waves—vibrations that flow through the air. Some of these waves might even be caused by the changing tide, the gravitational waves from the Moon.

The usual way to make spaghetti wavy is to soak them in water, but here I scanned them on a flatbed scanner. Halfway through the scan, i moved the spaghetti, creating the wave-like texture in the middle.

What's interesting is that the movement created these artifacts, waves of spaghetti that are green and red. I'm not sure what caused them; maybe it's the way the scanner sensor picked up the object in motion, or maybe it's how the light is reflecting off the moving pasta. What we do know is that it's related to waves.

A flatbed scanner is not designed for moving subjects. It's a camera that meticulously moves row to row to capture fine details of a still object. So when the object is in motion, unexpected outcomes occur. The fine details of green and red waves emerge, even though there are no green or red spaghetti. But even more broadly, the wavy spaghetti does not exist outside of this scan. After the scan, the uncooked pasta goes back into its box, rigid and straight.

A camera (and a scanner) operates by freezing waves, light waves in stasis. Here movement is frozen, but its impact is still felt and seen, via these waves. Even if the physical object showed no sign of change afterwards, the scanner captured the reality of the process. For a moment, the rigid pasta became wavy, broke so free that it burst into new colors.

When we start to see things as they are, everything as waves, as these oscillations of matter and transfer of energy, not only do we break free from the rigidity of what's around us, but it gives us room and energy to break into new dimensions. When we let go of assumptions of how spaghetti functioned in the past, and relinquish the fate of spaghetti future, we can start to embrace the fluidity of spaghetti present.