“You look at it, you think it’s the only fixed point in the cosmos. but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same… Wherever you put it, Foucault’s Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it.”
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
My random generator is a spinning top.
Underwhelming, I know.
Unless you count the compass I will use underneath it, but even then, it is underwhelming. There is one simple step to use this generator. Even a child could do it. My generator is a child’s toy.
In the first version, I used eight credit cards (because it’s all I had on hand) to delineate the eight cardinal and ordinal directions, as my makeshift compass rose. Perhaps I will make a compass rose out of cardboard, but currently, this has proven sufficient. All one has to do is spin the top, and the direction it lands in will guide the artwork.
I plan to make a later version with a 360 degree compass instead of the cardinal and ordinal directions.
My artwork will be a drawing.
To draw, begin with the pencil in the middle of the page, spin the top, and use the direction or degree it provides you with to draw a stroke in that direction. The stroke will not have a determined length, but whatever feels comfortable to you. For me, it will be whatever my abnormally tiny hands have habituated to, I guess.
On newspaper or magazines, the lines will link images and words together. On a map, it will link locations together. On a picture, it will create vectors. The lines itself will create shapes and forms. Let’s see what sort of coincidental meanings are made, shall we?
On blank white or black paper, it will resemble constellations, nonexistent or known, surrounded by emptiness. The universe is mostly emptiness, after all, and as the universe is expanding, dark energy and matter (which we perceive as emptiness) will continue to compose more of the universe, until the expansion of the universe overpowers gravity and tears molecules apart by it’s atoms, so stars will burn out and life will perish, and nothing might happen ever again.
If art is to reflect reality, then I want to reflect a literal universal reality, of which most of the world is incomplete and currently inconceivable.
I am reminded of a chat I had with a friend, fawning over Eco’s novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum.” I have not read it myself, but I am familiar with what the Foucault Pendulum is. It’s a device that visibly demonstrates the rotation of the Earth.
It’s one of the forces we can’t escape: rotation. Electrons spin. The Earth spins around the sun and the moon spins around the Earth. Humans rely on spinning for a lot of things, like tire wheels and spinning wool into yarn. The spinning top itself is reminiscent of the spindle. A force of nature and a law of physics is contained within a children’s toy.
Sweet dreams. 🙂