The Speed of Light

The Speed of Light is an installation by United Visual Artists, commissioned by Virgin Media to celebrate 10 years of broadband. I decided to visit this installation because of my growing interest in interactive, installation art. I found their use of lasers appealing and interesting as I thought about using them myself as means to visualise chance encounters between people and some of my intersection ideas about different paths connecting. The exhibition is a spectacle of light, the laser beams create an exciting environment which works in conjunction with sound. As you enter you are prompted to speak into a microphone by a screen asking you different questions, the sound you produce is then looped around the three floors of the exhibition and used to trigger different lights as you hear your own voice echoing around the rooms. This interactive element is very successful and really engages with the visitor, because of this interaction the exhibition is different every time, depending on who visits and what they say, making it a good example of the use of chance elements.

On the third floor the show reaches a crescendo with a laser light show, using four lasers one in each corner of the room. The beams move and dance, crossing paths at varying speeds, suspense and tension is created by the way the visuals work with the sound which is a mixture of voices collected in the first room, live streams from news sites and ambient sounds. The sounds and lights work together to create layers of interest and at times a sense of confusion which I think mimics the confusion that growing communication technology creates. I think the exhibition did very well to visualise the themes of broadband, the internet and communication. In the last room in particular the show worked to conjure ideas about the way people interact across the world and how peoples life interconnect, which is very relevant to my work at the moment. The show has given me inspiration to attempt to tackle an installation myself and well as sparking further ideas for me about the way people communicate and how this links to my ideas about chance.

I have recently discovered the work of Jonathan Harris who is an artist and designer based in New York. His book We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents graphic representations of peoples emotional responses, gathered from thousands of blogs from all over the internet. The book collects and quantifies a mass of data from these blogs, presenting: ' a contemporary portrait of the world's emotional landscape, exploring the ups and downs of everyday life in all its colour, chaos, and candor.'

The way he presents this information is clear and concise but also sensitive to the emotional content, a truly inspirational piece of graphic communication for me.

Jonathan Harris

Final Coincidence Book

CHANCE/CHAOS/ORDER book series

I am planning to collect all the stories I have come across during my research for this unit of work and compile a series of short stories on the theme CHANCE//CHAOS//ORDER. This idea is based around Penguins 'Great Ideas' series.

I want the covers to relate to each other and also the overall themes and be presented as a collection in a box. The series will include:

The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges

De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi by Stanislaw Lem

The Three Princes of Serendip - ancient Persian tale

Short extract from Silence by John Cage

Short Extract from The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

Coincidence Book Layouts

Coincidence Book

I have organised the information collected through my coincidence survey. My aim is to present this information in a small book. This is an extension of my experiments with presenting the coincidence stories next to collaged illustrations.

I have picked out the stories and quotes that have the most impact and arranged them opposite photographs. The photographs were taken on my Diana mini lomography camera which allows double exposures. In this way the images taken have two layers which coincide in an unpredictable way, it is not therefore their content but the way they are taken that is important in this context. I did however choose to photograph crowds of people as I wished to show the complexity created when people coincide. I have mocked up an initial book (pictured here) which will be refined before being printed finally.

Daniel Eatock

Daniel Eatock has proved an inspiration to me particularly his ongoing photo journal ‘photo of the week’. In these photo’s and throughout his work he shows how coincidences occur in the world around us, depicting them in a simple and humorous way, on his website he states: ‘I seek alignments, paradoxes, chance circumstance, loops, impossibilities and wit encountered in everyday life.’ The simplicity in which he presents his work, no frills just raw ideas and lots of them has shown me the possibility in making connections through photography and how an idea can be realised with less fuss than I am inclined towards, but with great results.

http://www.danieleatock.com/

Nearly Different

By manipulating these old family photographs of my grandparents and father as a baby I am trying to visualise the idea that it all could have been different, if one little decision was made differently, our reality could be something else entirely, that is if we exist still at all. I am interested in trying to bring this to attention in order to highlight how improbable the world in the form it appears to us. This rather crude depiction shows the real photograph and also an altered one where a different man is in my grandfathers place and my father is blurred out.

Screen Printing Experiments

Intersection Screen Prints

I have made screen prints using the photos depicting the intersections between people as an explanation of how chance works. I've overlaid text and experimented with image and background colours. This is a real example of how my work has developed through a process as the final look of the images is all a result of trial or accident.

Feedback Film Experiments

Second experiment

Feedback Film Experiments

These are some initial experiments I have done today with feedback from a television to a camera in an attempt to illustrate chaos theory. I am finding these experiments fascinating, and the visuals created have some potential. Doing this has also allowed me to come to grips with the theory through practical work.

CHAOS

The concept of chaos in science has come up during my research and provides a concrete theory for the reason we cannot accurately predict anything and that the future is in fact undeterminable. Most of us are familiar with the butterfly effect as a concept that explains chaos: a butterfly flaps its wings causing the air current around it to move which in turn causes changes in a larger air current and so on until large weather systems are effected. We cannot predict how a tiny action will effect other actions and in turn how it will effect our future.

A television program that was suggested to me by my tutor has illustrated this for me clearly, The Secret life of Chaos <http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pv1c3/The_Secret_Life_of_Chaos/> The program has brought to my attention a way of showing how a small action can create unpredictable outcomes, by filming feedback the layering of actions that are effected in sequence by the previous action is shown on screen. I am now in the process of carrying out film tests to discover what can be shown myself.

Intersecting Objects

This is a quick sketch visualising the photographs I am planning to take of the intersection between the worldlines of objects. The lines will be created using black elastic, I am imagining that the elastic will create interesting patterns and shapes in the room when lit in the right way, giving the overall aesthetic of the image complexity in turn illustrating the intricacy of the way objects interact.

Representing Worldlines

At the moment I am working on how to visually represent the concept of worldlines, which are basically a causal chain explaining how someone moves through time and space. The intersection of people’s worldlines is what causes them to interact and chance happenings to occur. These photographs are initial experiments with representing these concepts.

I have used small ready made models of people and connected them using thread, experimenting with the lighting and the way the shadows fall. I have tried to create complexity in the image by layering photographs. Although I find these images somewhat successful I will now refine the ideas and tidy up the production of the photographs. I also wish to show this concept in a slightly different way by creating worldlines in thread for objects instead of people, putting them in a real domestic situation and photographing them.

ALL THE CHANCE OCCURRENCES THAT LED TO MY BIRTH AND SOME IMAGINARY ONES THAT DIDN'T

‘A Perfect Vacuum’ has sparked some thought about how things happen and the importance of chance encounters in the way our lives take shape. This is an experiment using the idea of Lem’s to trace the encounters that led to my own birth, I have only used a few examples. I have also traced some imagined occurrences that led to me not being born, the way it is shown together is also an experiment in visualising the ‘Many Worlds Theory’ I have talked about previously. The different threads or causal chains are actually set on separate layers with the view to print them on transparent paper so they will show through but can also be read separately.

Many Worlds Interpretation

The research I have carried out has led me consider some theories of quantum mechanics. Although these theories are quite weighty and hard to get your head around, they are actually really interesting in relation to chance connections and explanations about the world. The Many Worlds interpretation in simply terms is the theory formulated by Hugh Everett in 1957 as an explanation of quantum mechanics. When an action is undertaken you are left with the result of that action in our reality, the basic principle of the theory is that all possible results have actually happened but in another world. Everything that possibly could have occurred in our past but didn’t is thought to have happened in another universe. Although this theory sounds far fetched it is actually one of the main theories of quantum mechanics. I am interested in how I might represent this graphically and have also been doing more research into the field of quantum mechanics.

Flipping a Penny

A Perfect Vacuum

During my Research into John Cage, I have been doing for my dissertation about the role chance has played in the development of art, I discovered the author Stanislaw Lem. This book ‘A perfect Vacuum’ is the collection of reviews the author has written on imaginary books, the story that was of particular interest to me was ‘De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi’ in which the imaginary author of the story being reviewed details all the happenings that led to his birth by tracing the situations in which his ancestors met as well as the causes behind these back into time, coming to the conclusion that according to laws of probability he should not exist. The point is being made that before events occur the probability of all these things happening in succession to produce the birth of the author are close to zero, they have however happened in this way. Lem is therefore illustrating what he sees as a failure of probability theory, the fact that improbable events occur everyday and that in fact most events that have happened would have been considered improbable before they occurred. This story has provoked a lot of thought for me, in particular they way the author suggests people exists of there own worldlines, this is a quote explaining this notion from the essay which provided the reference for me:

‘Chance, the narrator suggests is the intersection of independent causal chains. Each is deterministic on its own, but the intersections create unthinkable complexity and inevitable unpredictability. In this view, the world comes into existence as threads of independent worldlines a term describing how subatomic particles move through spacetime -- whose intersections create the warp and woof of the universe.’ Katherine Hayles, Chance Operations: Cagean Paradox and Contemporary Science.

I am working on ways to represent these ideas in the form of screen prints with different layers showing the causal wordlines of objects.

Coincidence Story illustration.

Coincidence Stories

Here I have presented one of the stories collected from the coincidence questionnaires. I have illustrated it with a simple image, letting the story speak for itself. The most striking stories will be made into a book, I will possibly use photography to illustrate them instead of collage. The story is written below as the font is too small to read.

This coincidence is actually not mine, but is how my grandma and her companion met. My grandma’s full name is Monique Gernigon, ten years ago she went traveling in Europe and lost her luggage. On the label was written M.Gernigon and her address in france. Two months later Air France called to say her luggage had been located in the Congo and that it would be delivered to her as soon as it arrived in france. She then got a phone call from a Maurice Gernigon who found himself with my grandma’s luggage, it turned out he lived just a few miles away and that the airport had delivered the luggage to the wrong address but to someone with the same initial and surname. They met up so that Maurice could hand back the luggage, since then Maurice and Monique Gernigon have been together for ten years. Without the coincidence of them sharing the same first initial and surname and the mix up caused by this at the airport they would never have met. It just makes me feel that life can be full of surprises and that things happen for a reason.

Coincidence

Coincidence: A remarkable concurrence of two of more incidents that have no obvious causal connection.

My interest and intrigue into coincidences has grown from my research into the concept of chance. People explain coincidences in a range of ways from supernatural explanations such as a sign from god, to them just being part of the way the world works in terms of probability. One thing is for certain, that people have an inherent interest in coincidences. When two seemingly unrelated events or happenings coincide a sense of wonder is often created, people look at the world differently. When a coincidence occurs often our sense of what is rationally possible is changed for a brief moment. I have created a questionnaire to gather stories of coincidence as well as peoples personal views in order to widen my understanding of the subject in relation to other peoples experiences.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=XoVrcaw_2bbB5tkVYK_2ftt_2byw_3d_3d