Kofeser — Meaningless Meaningfulness

"Over the years, Sivert has created a multitude of sculptures without any direct intention — sculptures that seem to have arisen from chance or from unconscious moments of creation. An unconscious randomness, or perhaps a random consciousness.

He chose to call these sculptures kofeser. A concept that perhaps needs an explanation — or perhaps not. For a kofes is a kofes and nothing else.
Someone might describe these sculptures as 'free form', comparable to the free expression of jazz music. Others would call them something entirely different…

Those interested in history can advantageously read the short essay available on the page, which discusses the word 'kofes' and its presumed origin. It was an article Sivert gave me on one occasion, when I asked him where the word actually came from.

In probability theory, the concept of randomness is used for something unpredictable. This means that even if an experiment is repeated under exactly the same conditions, it is not possible to predict the result from one instance to the next.

Based on the random experiment, a model is created. A model is not the same as reality, but a way to describe it as well as possible. The model is then used as a basis for mathematical calculations.

But does randomness truly exist?
The question has been debated by learned men and women since the beginning of time. Let me 'wriggle' out of this thought in the following way:
One can believe in fate, in God, and in randomness. But how are these truly connected? Is it God who, in His inexhaustible goodness or grace, controls fate — and fate in turn controls us?

Why did Sivert, when he modeled himself as a 'sitter', become the chalice that represents Hygieia — daughter of Asclepius in Greek mythology and goddess of health, prudence, and renewal?
That must remain unanswered…

The chalice — the cup — from which the serpent drinks has traditionally become a symbol of healing and restoration.

Is it randomness that predetermines our lives and our creativity? Could it be that supposedly inexplicable coincidences, or otherwise strange events, should be interpreted as a sign from above — something already predetermined by fate?

And what about synchronicity, that is, simultaneous events that lack a demonstrable causal connection?

This was a theme that Sivert and I returned to many times. The ancient Greeks perceived randomness as something that could be controlled by the gods. They even had a goddess for randomness, fate, and good fortune: Tyche.
We agreed that randomness cannot be ruled out… from happening.
'Shit happens… c’est la vie!'

This phenomenon even reappears in what is commonly called Murphy's Law — a saying or an aphorism often formulated as: 'Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.'
Although similar assertions and beliefs have occurred throughout history, the law itself was coined, and named after, the American aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy Jr. (1918–1990). One of the formulations attributed to him reads approximately: if there are two or more ways to perform a task, and one of these ways leads to a catastrophe, someone will sooner or later choose precisely that way.

Yet another example we find within chaos theory, in what is commonly called the butterfly effect. It describes a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a very small change in a deterministic, non-linear system can lead to large differences in the system's later development.

The idea that small causes can have large consequences — 'all small streams…' — was already noted by the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré (1854–1912). The American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) also contributed to the development of the ideas that would later be linked to chaos theory.

Edward Lorenz's work provided a quantitative basis for the concept of instability in the Earth's atmosphere and linked it to properties of large classes of dynamic systems exhibiting non-linear dynamics and deterministic chaos.

The climate crisis can, in its own way, be seen as the sum of small, seemingly independent events — a long chain of actions and consequences where the individual contribution can easily be perceived as insignificant.
Perhaps that is precisely where the foundation for our conscious or unconscious self-deception lies:
'What I do matters so little.'
/JÖ

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