Randomness is meant to be touched

(c) Eugenie Desmedt
Randomness is meant to be touched, 2022
Wooden Branch, Conductive Paint, Arduino, LED Lights; 30 x 150 cm

Things have a special kind of magic when they just find you. When they are unexpected, unplanned, when they flash across your mind and go all the way in, find all doors open. What this really means: Things have a special kind of magic when they are random. I found the branch on a cold day in the woods North of Vienna, without ever looking for one. To me, being found is the defining quality of it. There is something equally charming and unsettling about the reasonlessness in which some things occur, without purpose or deeper sense.

Randomness is at the core of my conception of Radical Matter. In quantum physics, randomness is a fundamental concept. Suddenly we are confronted with an intrinsic unpredictability, a border that is reached where everything that lies further is just randomness. To see oneself at this border can be a strange almost vertigo-like experience: our brains are programmed to find patterns everywhere, so much so that the process of seeing almost merges with the process of rationalizing.

This work is a proposal: to meet eye to eye, skin to skin, and go beyond the mathematical definition and form a personal relationship to an abstract concept. This is not just a philosophical process, but also a quite practical one: how an ideal lives in our minds determines what questions we ask about it and what expectations we have about the answers we could find.

Just like our measurement of particles makes properties surface that were undecided before, my finding the branch turned it into an object. Covered in conductive paint, drilled, and presented with an intended use, my perception became a property of it. Following this process, every person touching it during the exhibition becomes involved, changes the current, changes the algorithm in the arduino that is implanted into the branch, and makes it their own for the duration of a touch.

The branch is displayed on the wall, mounted with reinforced steel that is usually used for concrete construction work. Coming from the Arduino inside the branch, a low voltage is sent through its surface and through every person touching it. Depending on the conductivity of the body, the LED lights on the back of the branch paint random light patterns on the wall.

Fact Box