No fire.
Leave it on all night, or all winter. If it falls over, nothing spills and nothing catches fire.
V · Provenance
Singapore by Night
Walking past a hotel, I saw dozens of candles floating in the air. Up close, they were circuit boards.
Suspended by wires throughout the lobby were My New Flame candles, designed in 2012 by Moritz Waldemeyer, Ingo Maurer, and his team. Their beautiful flames were recordings of a real candle, shuffled so that the motion never repeated. I wondered how a flame could be generated instead of played back.
For years, this seemed like a physics problem, the kind that might require a degree in fluid dynamics. Machine learning offered another approach. Instead of simulating a flame, a model could be trained to generate one. When language models learned to write code, the final stages of development became a conversation.
I recorded the candle flame footage and designed the circuit board myself, drawing every trace by hand. Yet the work is also co-authored by a ghost in the machine, a diffusion of knowledge drawn from countless human contributions.
We don't yet know what it means for ordinary objects to have minds. You don't wait for others to find out. You build one carefully, set it on the table, and live with it for a while. A candle seems like a bright place to start.