The Chaos Engine
Interactive Art - User Created, with something to take away
The Chaos Engine is an interactive sculpture that will track chaos. It's opposing magnetic forces cause the pendulum to buck erratically, mirroring the properties of chaos.
The tracked points create a fractal that the viewer can print out and take away as a unique piece of art created by them.
The idea behind The Chaos Engine was to mirror Henri Poincare's solution to the 3 Body Problem, although when he 'solved' the equations as to whether the Solar system was stable, he was the only person clever enough to see his error and so Chaos Mathematics was born.
Problems that I encountered on the build included:
Frame rate and capture quality on the video, after trying a few webcams I opted for a DV video camera, it was by far the best. That was also the main reason that I've ended working this project through a Mac, better video handling on the apple.
What is the reddest thing you know of? After trying many objects and paints it really does turn out that the reddest thing you can get is a red nose from Comic Relief. It is probably my admiration of Marcel Duchamps that makes me so keen to use ready made things in my art. To amend and usurp them into my ends.
The processing work was quite easy really, there is a great community that put their code up for others to amend and play with, gawd bless Goran Levin.
Luckily I was featured by Creative Review which scared the hell out me when I got hundreds of extra readers of my blog.
During our Interactive Media Show I was pleased with the punters playing, most seemed very happy with taking away a physical print from their swing of the Chaos Engine and pressing of the big red button. One person became quite obsessive about creating the smallest tightest circle that she could by using the movable base and another was taken by the images created looking similar to the output of CERN's ATLAS tracking of particles escaping their high energy collisions and he cleared and started again many times to create his ideal image. This made me very happy.
I created a repository at TheChaosEngine on deviantArt so that any images that people created could be saved, this process is ongoing and will include any images created at the Graduate Show in Newport University's City Centre Campus from 17 to 24 June, please contact me if you would like to create your own piece of Chaos Engine work or pop along to D9 suring the Grad Show.
In conclusion, I have had the Chaos Engine on my mind for years, I've made it, it works, and it creates Beauty, individual and automatic Beauty. Well done me!
