A Study in Entropy for Observation and Interaction (Phase One)
A kinetic sculpture created for the end of my first year at the C:Art:Media program at Valand School of Fine Art in Göteborg, Sweden.
This piece is a response to the series of prints I made in 2007 called "Consciousness and the Implicate Order." It is an instrument intended to call attention to the viewer's process of attention and awareness.
I was interested in how the viewer perceives "true" randomness, something which is completely outside of our daily experiences. It is only possible to measure such events after they have occurred. I put true in quotes because of my interest in determinism through the implicate order.
Everything occurs in the present tense.
All acts of consciousness are acts of presentification.
It should be noted that the movement of the arms is not algorithmic, due to the fact that they get their data from radioactive decay. The overall program is of course an algorithm, but the movement position of the arms cannot be described in this way. This contradiction is important to the work.
Tech details:
Encased within all of the wood is a computer, a microcontroller, several motors, a power supply, and two geiger counters. The movement of the motors is informed by the random numbers gained from the Geiger counters, which are looking at pieces of radioactive metal. The timing of the motors as well as the interface between the microcontroller and the Geiger counters is a program I made in the Processing language.