Jenga jenga

You know the game; you play it with wood blocks.  You undermine the foundation of the tower and keep adding to the top.  Sooner or later, the whole tower collapses and that ends the game.  If you want to play the game again, you have to re-build the whole tower from scratch and then start undermining again.  You can, of course, play the game with material other than wood blocks. As you might expect, I did it with rocks. I played the game with one of my towering stone arch creations.  It was, I tell you, a rather precarious process. A bit dangerous perhaps.  But that made it exciting…  

This exhibit wants you to think about and experience the concept of collapse.   What happens when you undermine the foundation of a structure and keep adding more and more material to the top?  I don’t wish to be overtly metaphorical.  But it does seem to be the same game that King Trumpy and his team of Techno Oligarchs are playing with the US economy right now.  How long before the whole thing collapses?  Then what? 

After I collapsed my stone arch tower, I was left with a pile of random rock ruins. I used those ruins to build a brand new tower of stone arches. If Trumpy and the Tech Lords succeed in collapsing the US economy;  Will they be able to build a brand new economy from the ruins of the old one?  I doubt it.  That challenging but not impossible task will be left up to us.  I recommend starting local. Can we use the ruins of our wrecked economy to create something new and beautiful?  All we can do is try?

As you can see, the new creation only has four arches instead of five like the previous. That’s because I ran out of rocks. I used them all. I was really hoping to add quite a bit more. If anybody out there happens to have a small pile of rocks to get rid of, you can bring them to my place and add them to my pile.

I did, indeed, get a delivery of another small pile of rocks. So now my pile of rocks is bigger and I was able to complete my creation as I imagined it to be. It is still the same ever-evolving rock pile only now it includes a lot of new members. There are now five separate arches in one structure. And when the setting sun hits that pile of rocks just right; it is quite a sight to see.

To see more video of the destruction/creation/evolution of the rock pile; become a patron of the Stoney Rocks Museum: