Douglas Irving Repetto

Artist, teacher, and Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center, New York

There are facts: elements exist, they're distinct, and they seem to have relationships to one another. When you arrange information about them in certain ways, those relationships become clearer, or imply additional relationships. But those relationships are not simple, linear, or amenable to clean, squared-off rows and columns. There are gaps, orphans, and odd asymmetries. There's no arrangement of the elements that somehow reflects "real" nature, a Platonic table in the sky. There were, and are, competing and complementary ways of arranging the elements, and those ways themselves have followed, and continue to follow, complex developmental paths. There are holes in the table—one was filled with copernicium (Cn), atomic number 112, last year. There are more holes, spots for elements that have been discovered experimentally, but not yet confirmed by international bodies. And still other holes exist for elements that are conceptually possible (space reserved), but perhaps physically impossible. The table is, in name and practice, periodic, cyclical. One thing leads to another, but nothing really leads to any place in particular. Each element implies others, even those rarely, if ever, found in nature. If—when—the table is "finished," filled in, not much will change. No one is waiting for that last element before they begin.

Seduction by progress begins with the glimmer that life is about finishing rather than doing.

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