- According to TATE Gallery (Gallery label, December 2008), “Duchamp regarded chance as a means ‘to combat logical reality’. This work was made by dropping three threads, each a metre long, from a height equal to their length, then cutting wooden rulers to record the shape in which each had fallen. Duchamp described these as ‘a preserved metre, preserved chance’. He later used the templates in his composition on glass The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) to draw the capillary tubes connected to the nine Bachelors’ heads.” And we can conclude from George Brecht’s article that in order to create a version of this piece, firstly, we need to hold a thread one meter long, straight and horizontal, one meter above a blank canvas. Secondly, we should let the thread fall onto the canvas, and then it can be fixed with a trickle of varnish into the chance convolution in which it fell. What’s more, we need to repeat the above steps 3 times.
- Talking about how to reduce bias, we can know from the article that we can resort to compound chance events, and use random numbers. If we want to translate those techniques to be used with interactive computer program, we can create a canvas and generate random numbers intermittently as coordinates, then show a character on that position, and let players chase after the character, for example, click on the character(let’s say it is a cat) to catch the cat, and the program should count the amount of caught cats in a limited time. I think that sounds like an interactive game.
- I agree with the idea that art should reflect the wider cultural environment of the time it is produced, especially the science and technology development of that certain era. In fact, I believe it is an inevitable phenomenon that art reflects the changes of the times. For example, the birth of impressionist art is based on the extensive use of electricity in the second industrial revolution. Science and technology have promoted people’s understanding of light and color, so that Impressionist painters can apply scientific color theory to painting. This art school rising in the middle and late 19th century reflects the scientific development with its unique creative form.
- I believe a good methodology to produce a truly random number for me is that to take out my phone and check the last phone number in call log.
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