Drop Process 2 (Cardinals) (2018)
Projectors, tripods, customised Raspberry Pi computers, custom-written software
The Drop Process series (2018 - ) shows what happens when we drop simple virtual plates over and over. At times, they fall into messy piles, repeatedly knocked into a new chaotic configuration. At other times, they find stability and accumulate, forming sturdy towers with erratic silhouettes. Eventually, however, all structures succumb to virtual gravity. Each piece in the series uses multiple projections, side by side or overlapping, to highlight the innate variety and similarities in the live simulated systems. As one rises, another falls. But each will persistently and rhythmically drop plates forever.
Drop Process 2 (Cardinals) presents the work as a digital installation where the seemingly identical computers, projectors and their tripod supports are brought into the space. Each station of the work comprises a tripod, computer, and projector displaying the simulation in crimson red. They stand, almost militarily, in a line between the audience and the images, asserting their physical presence and demanding the audience navigate the digital with their bodies. Their physical uniformity is in tension with the wildly divergent live simulated systems that they perform. Despite running the same software, the same script, each projection, each performance, is unique. This variability is achieved partially through software but also through the minute differences in each computer’s hardware and physical situation. As chaos theory describes, minute differences here can produce change at simultaneously profound and banal levels.
Drop Process 2 (Cardinals) forms part of Gouldstone’s investigation into what he calls ‘the irrational image.’ This term refers to a moving image that, like its mathematical counterpart the irrational number, can play forever without ever looping or repeating itself. Like most irrational numbers, the irrationality of Gouldstone’s images cannot be conclusively proven. Instead, they must be played ad infinitum. This boundless timescale pulls the work outside the temporality of both the human and humanity itself and into a new timeframe that can only be explored in the imagination.
Exhibition history:
-Drop Process 2 (Cardinals), part of Deptford X Fringe 2018, ACAVA Studios, Deptford, London
-Chengdu Biennale, curated by Fan Di'an, Chengdu, China, 2021