Phosphor

Memory.

The light source which acts as the pen is a single laser beam, controlled by a computer and moving very fast. Our eyes are slow. If we were rotating that beam in a circle fast enough, we would see a continuous shape, which in reality is just a moving dot. But our memory is limited, we only merge visual data appearing in a very short period into a single shape, less than 1/20 of a second.

In this installation, the laser beam hits phosphorescent pigments, and those keep emitting light up to 30 minutes after being exposed, slowly getting darker over time. The canvas keeps a memory of the movements of the laser beam for that time period, where the newest traces are brightest, and history slowly fades away. As a result, everything which has been drawn in the last half hour adds up to the image, creating a much more complex, much more intricate, but only temporary painting.

Landscape.

At the hidden digital core of the installation, a piece of code represents an imaginary landscape, a 3D model of a non-existing world, a mountain range of data. The laser beam draws the result of placing a drop of water onto a random position in this landscape and calculating the best path downwards the coast, which is the edges of the canvas. Whilst doing so, it slightly changes the mountain's shape, in a very rough approximation of the effects of erosion, resulting in different trajectories throughout the passing of time.

Time. God. Flaws.

The model is not perfect, it needs divine intervention to stay interesting. Sometimes the path of the virtual water drops is artificially shaken, turning the straight lines into a cloud of points, a little thunderstorm, which looks nice and speeds up the process of erosion. At other times the movements follow a complete artificial grid, inspired by the large-scale man-made structures we planted in the landscape around us, like endless progressions of oil pumps in the desert. The only things pre-programmed in the installation is the basic behaviour and a set of random probabilities for certain events to happen. The process of creation was one of tuning those values, defining the right speeds of movements, the amount of inherent randomness. Afterwards the world is left to its own, outside of control by the artist, who becomes an observer, just like the audience.