A Case for Keeping It Random, The New York Times

A Case for Keeping It Random, The New York Times

nytimes.com
Webseite
2021
English
Alexis Kleinman
nytimes.com, PDF

PAID POST by Dashlane — A Case for Keeping It Randome explores the role of randomness in art, science and cybersecurity.
... Marc Lee, a Swiss artist, also makes art for and with the internet. His project “Airport Lounge” shows social media posts sent from airport lounges laid on top of satellite images of airports. Lee doesn’t choose which posts end up in the piece. “I just take the newest social media posts,” he says. “It's a strict concept. I always start with the youngest posts in the beginning. You never know who is posting what.” Without this randomness, Lee says, “the piece would not work.”
He isn’t interested only in the unpredictability of the internet and art; he also takes what he calls “random walks.” When he’s in a new city, he chooses a random starting point, turns off his phone and simply walks in a straight line. He follows the streets, but doesn’t use a GPS or map. He has taken these walks for six days in a row.
The goal is “to see things as they are, with no target and no plan,” Lee explains. The unpredictable walks shake him out of his routine and help him relax, he says.
For both Pozanti and Lee, random doesn’t mean aimless. “My randomness is very purposeful,” Pozanti says. “I wanted to keep a human element in the creation process, which is intuition.”