THE SPIRIT OF RANDOM

Recently I designed a staircase for our new showroom, which called for random lengths of wood. This posed a problem for the joiner: how do you 'do random'? Actually, I had hoped that we could access a source of waste off-cuts, because the stairs are made from short pieces. But our timber trade is too efficient, so he had to purchase new lengths and cut them. Hence the problem.

 

We live in a very ordered world, where our default setting is pedantic and repetitive consistency rather than aesthetic disorder. It is far easier for the joiner to cut every piece to the same length, than it is to have to think about each cut and make a decision as to whether it is longer or shorter than the previous one, and by how much. The more consciously you think about it the harder randomness is to achieve.

 

This reminded me of a conversation I had in the Australian outback last year. I had been asked about the relevance of photography to my design work. It was one of those rewarding and revealing moments when you find yourself uttering a thought that you didn't know you had. I answered that it is necessary for me to constantly refresh my perception and understanding of randomness, in order to balance the constant reductio ad ordo tendency of my rational mind. Observing nature allows this to happen, particularly the close-up or isolated details that I tend to photograph.

 

We are fearful of the anarchy of disorder. We are fearful of revealing clumsiness or unsophistication in wrong decisions, so we default to ordered options that do not require choice. We are also lazy because a decision requires effort. Anyone with a ruler can draw a resolved regular pattern, especially if you use a formula like the golden mean. But an irregular pattern? . . . “Oh no I can't do that!” It is too expressive and revealing. How do you know where to put the next mark? There is nothing to fall back on except your own aesthetic discernment.

 

Yet look at nature, look at the immaculate patterns on the feathers of birds, or on the scales of tropical fish: none are the same, no mark is predictable after the one before, but they are all perfectly in place. How do we achieve such inspiring and replenishing creations? We have to shut off the rational mind, and find enough trust to yield to the subconscious. Building a memory bank from which to draw, requires regular immersion in the multilayered structures of nature. Out of this process comes an inspiring link to the intricacies and beauties of the world around us, which are so easily forgotten or oversimplified. Such filtering between nature and human is the process of art and it is fundamental to the inception of design.

Posted by David Trubridge on 3 October 2011 | 2 Comments

Tags: Design, art, pattern