Hello, my name is Sarah Mlodzianowski. I consider myself a professional people watcher and story enthusiast. I have a Masters of Research in Anthropology and have always been fascinated with storytelling and how we share information. I am currently studying the Masters of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art & Design.
My aims for this course are to lean into the aspects of play and hold as little expectation as possible about the process or outcomes. For this task I wanted to play with the idea of something random drawn from one of my favourite books ‘The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul’ by Douglas Adams. This book, specifically the audio book is a real favorite of mine, and is often something I will listen to when driving, or when feeling particularly stressed by work or life. The entire story is about chance and serendipity. One scene in particular always makes me smile when the protagonist, Dirk Gently discovers an electronic iChing calculator. My only exposure to the idea of iChing prior to this course is through ‘The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul’. I thought playing with iChing would be a fitting place to start experimenting.
In the words of Dirk Gently
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
The process of choosing the iChing was easy and came directly from the book. Through class discussion I chose to further scramble the data and use both the numbers and words generated in different ways. To select the iChing and the text shuffler I completed a Google search and selected the first link from the results, this in itself feels serendipitous as the data is based on my previous browsing history and what my online profile thinks I want to see.
Using the Random Generator, I have come to the word WELL.
Random Generator Explained:
1) iChing online generator, click the throw button while thinking “Serendipity”.
• Write down the two numbers -> calculate the difference between the numbers.
• Copy all the text to the clipboard.
2) Paste text into an online Text Shuffler, copy the shuffled text.
3) Count the number of words into the text as determined in step 1.
—> Experiment based on that word…
Random Generator in Action: