Pseudo Randomness

I decided for the installation to give the Youtube footage in This is Not Us a feel of cacophony and collective voice. The best way to do this was to play them in a grid. I attempted to have a different grid square speaking at any one time, but the clips were too short and the eye didn’t find the clip before it was over. So I prioritised the middle screen and enlarged it.

The timeline is attached - a very complicated project. When the videos were allowed to appear randomly, there were regularly 3, 4 or even 5 screens in the grid featuring the same person at one time. This was not aesthetically pleasing, and spoiled the feel of the collective voice. So I engaged with the concept of pseudo randomness. This is the technique used by Spotify and Itunes to make sure the same song doesn’t keep repeating. It gives an illusion of randomness that appears to be more random that true random appears to be. It created a lot more work, but was worth it.