Client: Hewlett Packard - New York

Location: New York, NY, United States

Completion date: 2015

Artwork budget: $125,000

Project Team

Artist

Rob Ley

Rob Ley Studio

Client

Hewlett Packard

Overview

My studio was commissioned to create and install a main entry wall piece that would connect the lobby to the main entrance on the street.

Goals

The term random typically implies an unpredictable value. As reasonable of a concept that this may be to us, it is fundamentally impossible to actually produce truly random numbers within a logic based system. Since even the first explorations with computers and programming, people have devised various methods to try and trick or tease a random value from computers, though the resultant numbers inevitably adhere to some recipe of uniform distribution. Thus, over a large enough data set, the pseudo in pseudorandom becomes increasingly more apparent. This piece is an exploration of the moment when a seemingly chaotic field reveals an emergent, ordered pattern.

Process

My studio was contacted by i4D who was working with HP in New York on their new facility, located in the meat packing district. They were nearing completion on a renovated building and saw the potential for a significant art piece located at the street level entry of their new facility. We worked through a series of ideas and gravitated towards a gradient art wall that would be influenced by an underlying principle of randomness within the highly logical world of computation.