Blog 06 – Randomness – srauch

I find Paul Dunham’s installation Click::RAND to be fascinating. It’s based on the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, which was published by the RAND corporation in 1955 to allow computer programmers to have an extensive amount of truly random numbers on hand. (The numbers themselves were generated by a program designed to work as a roulette wheel.) The book was available in standard print, but also as computer punchcards, and it’s the latter version that Dunham was inspired by. He created “instruments” by wiring together a grid of old-fashioned electromagnetic relays that make an audible click when they open and close, then feeding them the random numbers provided by the punchcards as instructions on when to move. The result is an audible experience of randomness, with ephemeral patterns seemingly flashing in and out of the composition.

The listening experience seems to say something about how we as humans tend to try to impose order on our surroundings. Because of the way our neural networks work, we aren’t capable of thinking in a truly random way, and we have an inherent tendency to seek patterns. So, it’s an interesting experience to listen to something random and watch your brain spin itself out looking for patterns that actually aren’t there. 

Here is a video of Click::RAND in action. Scroll to about halfway in to see it in all its glory: