Turbulence

I applied for, and more amazingly, was accepted to do an installation in the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery during the ISEA conference in September (mostly in ABQ but spreading out through NNM). Axle is the really swell idea of two local guys who had an extra truck lying around and turned it into an itinerant gallery to show local artists, and the overall theme of the conference is Machine Wilderness. Thus I should be in good company:

 I gotta fill this van with, well, something. Packing peanuts came -- almost, after ping-pong balls and balloons -- immediately to mind. Of course, I can't just leave it alone so it has to be kinetic and even responsive to viewer input somehow.

That's a lotta peanuts. So I'm leaning towards fleshing it out with hot air...a bunch of fans to keep things moving and a few sensors to make the fans do stuff when folks are around.

Wednesday I got an acceptance email from the conference folks (I heard from Axle a couple weeks ago so I wasn't taken completely by surprise) which asked for a description and high resolution photograph of the work, by Monday, so I cobbled together a Bricoleur's Conception:

We Are Experiencing Some Turbulence

After all my whingeing about Art and Science* and how they should really go hand in hand I'm thrashing about on how to rationalize this.

First there is the idea of random behavior and how we perceive it, which has been a bit of a focus for me lately.

Then there's self-organized criticality -- rice piles and the like -- but they're not so easy to setup and control (strangely enough?). However I realized that it's really just the surface angle of the pile that's of interest, so I can build a slope that will encourage some avalanche behavior.

Then, while poking at self-organization, I, again, found Cosma Shalizi's articles which mentioned turbulence and the Reynolds number. That lead to this nice gif from wikipedia:

Then. While talking it over with my friend John Miller concerns about static electricity raised their ugly head. So I might have to work lightning into it as well -- or add anti-cling sheets in the mix.

So. There is hope that the experimental process will lead to an interesting combination of the above which can self-start-and-run in late September temperatures. And be more than just didactic or entertaining. Stay Tuned to this Tag...


* The whole Art/Sci/Tech thing has been another of my ongoing concerns. Ending with Systems Art in the 1970's I think the ideal of A/S/T integration has deteriorated into MTV. But that's a different story. Of concern here is that most, if not all, group projects fall into either the artist-gets-access-to-cool-toys or the scientist-gets-access-to-cool-presentations categories. There's not a lot of actual collaboration involved. And most, if not all, artist-conception-of-science projects are either critiques (usually a good thing) or scientism -- taking on the trappings of bubbling test tubes and the like -- with no real understanding of what goes on beneath the surface. There are exceptions. Hopefully my effort here may provide an example.