SYNTROPIC
performance, video installation, 2025
SYNTROPIC is a hour-long experimental theater piece that incorporates live music, improvisation, and explores the concept of syntropy, which, as the complementary opposite of entropy, proposes that living systems evolve toward complexity and harmony rather than chaos, positing that life is guided by attractors from the future.
Performance (self-directed): Josef Ka, Márton Mucsi (debut), Bianka (debut).
Live music and voice: UBE + Praux.
Art Direction, Video Installation, Video Editing: Gerdi Petanaj.
Camera: Benedek Bognár, Zsuzsi Simon.
Photos: Krystyna Bilak.
Organizer, Location: Art Quarter Budapest, in Budapest, 20 February 2025.
Syn- (σύν): "together" or "with." -tropy (τροπή): "turning" or "direction."
Syntropy was first introduced by Italian mathematician and physicist Luigi Fantappiè in the 1940s. Fantappiè was studying the solutions to the equations of quantum mechanics and noticed that some solutions seemed to describe systems that moved toward greater order and complexity, rather than disorder. He coined the term "syntropy" to describe this phenomenon.
Albert Szent-Györgyi, an Hungarian born Nobel Prize biologist, called syntropy "negative entropy" and proposed it as a principle explaining how living organisms create increased organization both internally and in their environment, suggesting syntropy as a coordinated, organizing force within living systems.
“Inanimate nature stops at the low level organization of simple molecules. But living systems go on and combine molecules to form macromolecules, macromolecules to form organelles (such as nuclei, mitochondria, chloropasts, ribosomes, and membranes) and eventually put these all together to form the greatest wonder of creation, a cell, with its astounding inner regulations. Then it goes on putting cells together to form "higher organisms" and increasingly more complex individuals ... at every step, new, more complex individuals...at every step, new, more complex and subtle qualities are created, and so in the end we are faced with properties which have no parallel in the inanimate world ..."
James Vargiu, 1977. Editor of Synthesis 1, (Introduction to article by Szent-Gyorgyi, p. 14).