Making generative sculpture with Arduino, found objects and Japanese Kintsugi
Feu Autonome Type 189: Untitled, one dimensional generative, reconstructed, found object
Arduino microcontroller and generative software code
This piece explores the simplicity of randomness embodied in a simple everyday piece of industrial equipment. A piece of 1960s industrial cast off that was abandoned and found buried in the forest, broken in fragments and reconstructed this work is an assemblage of heritages - combining Japanese Kintusgi, electronics and modern generative sensibility.
The work begins with the physicality of the found object. Originally discovered almost completely buried in an area of forest in the Belgian / Luxembourg border, the carcass is originally from a piece of abandoned electrical equipment manufactured in Paris in October 1962. The original bright yellow plastic case maintains a colour vibrancy that is apparently undiminished after over 60 years that projects an otherworldly permanence and artificiality that imbues the carcass of the object with an antique but alien presence. The makers inscription on the side declares the device a ‘Feu Autonome Type 189’ translating literally as an ‘autonomous fire’ more likely meaning an ‘autonomous light’.
When the object was found and the original fragments test assembled it became clear that this was needing to be repaired in Kintsugi style. Kintsugi (金継ぎ"golden joinery"), also sometimes known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い "golden repair”) is the traditional Japanese art of repairing broken pottery or other ceramics with an Urushiol-based lacquer as adhesive dusted or mixed with powdered gold or silver. The method employed for the repair in this object was actually completed using a two part epoxy resin, saturated with a gold powered and dusted with more loose gold powder during the curing process.
The reconstructed box was modified to accept a recycled hand torch. The torch assembly was severely corroded internally and was rewired to accept a large bezel blue high intensity LED lamp and cables. This is mated to an Arduino micro-controller. The shape and expressiveness of the code was planned through iterations of hand drawn diagrams and then extensively tested and modified over dozens of hours of testing and slow observations of the object's behaviour.
The code uses a set of interlinked variables driving loops of variable length that allow control of light intensity over time. These variables and loops are fed a number of different uses of the Random() function available in the Arduino programming environment. Although there are a number of timer functions, loops and interlinked parameters providing almost infinite variation in the expression of the object it in-effect does only one single thing. It explores one dimensional randomness using time as a differentiator. Moving only a single value - the light intensity - in one plane. From zero illumination to maximum brightness. Everything else of the expression and behaviour of the object is a side effect of how humans experience time, as a linear process. Eternally unfolding in only one direction. Each moment confronting us with the Augustine riddle of living in the specious present, - how can something that is not real - the future, become real - the present and then become unreal again - the past.
The code itself picks target intensity values for the light to reach and then picks ‘ramp times’ to take to get to these target light intensity values. As a line in the flow of time, the light values oscillate variably between periods of high change and cycles of seemingly almost predictable rhythms. In practice the object expresses an inscrutability that forces the viewer to confront the randomness within it. as first glance the object appears stable, often changing in infinitesimally small steps from one intensity to another. At other times the object can be misunderstood to appear to ‘breathe’ in the cycling of the light coming from the base of the object, only for this misapprehension to be dashed by the light oscillating into other periods of rapid change and then seeming inactivity or stable, cyclic calm.
The object is a found assemblage of digital, code, physical and electrical. At its core is an intangible expression of randomness, made visible with light, contained in a confrontingly physical, tangible body. A piece of found ‘industrial driftwood’ salvaged and reconstructed, not with perfection or restoration in mind but by using the Kintsugi technique, one that amplifies it’s physicality and impermanence. Drawing attention to these aspects with the use of gold, a symbol of power and luxury and permanence. Contrasting this with the procedural, generative processes hidden inside the inscrutable heart of the embedded micro-controller reveals a contrast that is at once disarmingly simple. A slowly pulsating light in a broken box, and then opens up the depth of the behaviour of the assemblage of parts