Printing.

The flock of sheep in a rain-lashed autumn meadow, their thick wool wet and clumping together, forms a living tableau of collective inertia in the midst of chaos, while the unaddressed advertising mail in your mailbox, thoughtlessly and carelessly deposited by an unknown hand, piles up like the paper residue of a consumer society that leaves its mark as indifferently as it does relentlessly. Chemically, the connection between these two worlds is as negligible as the difference between the cellulose fibers in paper and the organic composition of the tuft of grass torn loose by the storm and left on a sheep’s fleece: they are composed of similar basic elements, but the chemical function they fulfill in their respective contexts could not be more different.

From a socio-philosophical perspective, there seems to be something fascinating in the randomness with which these two images present themselves—the sheep, who despite the storm continue to gather around an invisible hierarchy, reflect a kind of primal group dynamic that, however chaotic, cannot be fully extracted from the natural order; the ad, on the other hand, is the product of a different kind of herd behavior, in which companies indiscriminately target a massive and anonymous audience, driven by nothing more than the hope that a single sheet of paper will find its way to a hand that will actually read it.

Slightly apathetically one might say that these two worlds, the pasture and the mailbox, will never touch, except perhaps in an absurd world in which a gust of wind were to carry a leaflet about a better sheep shearing machine to the pasture. And even then, even if the paper were to land on the wet back of a sheep, the moment would be but a futile reminder of a chance crossing of parallel realities that derive no meaning from each other.

And so, after this long, meandering exploration of connections that exist only as apparent connections, we can only conclude that there is no real relationship. The sheep stay in their stormy pasture, and the advertising mail stays in your mailbox—both as indifferent to each other as the world is to their existence.