Finding what isn't there?
Judy
Breck writes about her experiments with "dice-painting". From what
I've been able to discern, this seems to be something of a cross between casting
I Ching and Rorschach inkblots. Breck explains:
The roll of dice would decide where I would draw a line and in what direction. When I had created some shapes in this manner, more rolls of the dice would decide a color for each shape that had formed. Once my universe (the space within the frame drawn on a piece of paper) was filled, I would look at it carefully to see what had emerged.
I've long held an interest in chance operations in art, but I can't really claim
that Breck's exercise particularly interests me. Part of her explanation of her
attraction toward this project, however, does:
We tell each other that order really does emerge from chaos, that when we network a lot of pieces that don’t seem to belong to each other and the pieces form a pattern, the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts. A commons is a kind of chaos, and what unites us in iCommons is the conviction that the whole is more than the sum of the parts—that useful, meaningful patterns emerge.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if, rather than some emergent forms that call out
to her to be recognized, Breck simply finds what she wants to find in her dice-paintings.
And it's perhaps pushing things a bit to claim that the emergent forms of her
dice paintings have much in common with the disorganization that allows us to
find emergent order. On the other hand, I apparently chanced upon Breck's page
about dice-painting precisely when it was posted - while I was working on this
column. Perhaps that chance occurrence is actually the result of disorganization
at work.
Go to: Or vice versa, or
Go to: Please organize me.