Grace Cha – Looking Outwards- 06- Randomness

This was actually a student project from RISD Architecture class called: Coding Architecture in 2015, but I found it just as intriguing as any other project from a professional.  Aaron Tobey, decided to generate a manually -operated random machine with geometry.

For instance, he created a rectangle as the seed and then let the line bounce within the rectangle on a set of rule.  Numbers are generated based on where the line intersects the  edge of the rectangle.  Behind it all are a set of complex series of geometric operations and logical rules to build this random sequence.  Here he repeats this process over many boxes on the canvas. I like the way this view allows one to observe the behaviors of randomness at a distant level.  This sort of macro view of randomness reveals an interesting phenomenon–almost reveals a deep structural pattern.  Although I’m not too certain if he used actual randomness or pseudo-randomness, it is interesting to note the complexity in trying to create “randomness” (because even if it appears to be random, at a macro level, it looks sort of like a pattern).

For the time being, I’ve never thought twice about the origins of the random() function or even if it’s actually random or not, but this blog post has made me wonder what which type of random is needed for a particular situation.

Coding Architecture Course Website: http://lostritto.com/risd2015spring-seminar/