If artist Aram Bartholl is afraid of the dark, he couldn’t have avoided it any more elegantly. His most recent project, Random Screen, is a simple light display that uses old technology (candles and whirligigs) to mimic new technology, toying with our assumptions about the workings of the digital age.
Photograph by Aram Bartholl
The piece involves a grid of 16 paper boxes, each of which holds a tea light partially obscured by a beer-can pinwheel. The heat rising from the flame spins the pinwheel, and each pixel brightens and dims at a different rate, depending on the intensity of the flame and the speed of the pinwheel. The flickering lights are essentially a random number generator, although in spirit, they’re closer to a mechanical and (very) pixilated night sky.
Random Screen was the next generation of a project Bartholl realized in 2004, which was in turn inspired by a 2001 installation in Berlin by the Chaos Computer Club: Blinkenlights turned the windows of an office building in Alexanderplatz into a huge, interactive, pixilated screen. Bartholl made his own analog version, Papierpixel, using Christmas lights
and a 10-foot-long looped punch card to create a simple programmable moving image.
As in Random Screen, analog and digital flirt in full view, offering up a creation that approaches history from the back end, the past re-envisioned through the eyes of the future. Both pieces have been shown at a number of galleries around the world, and will be on view at the Ars Electronica festival (themed “Simplicity”) this fall.
“From a historical perspective,” says Bartholl, “one could speak of the invention of the screen that never existed.”
—Arwen O’Reilly
>>Random Screen: datenform.de/rscreeneng.html
Stay tuned for the DIY instructions appearing in CRAFT, Volume 01, on sale in October 2006.
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