top of page
credits
special thanks to:
Kanal, Centre George Pompidou et Beliris
engineering: Denkbar
Walter Wathieu, technical assistance
history
the artwork has been commissioned by Kanal, Centre George Pompidou themselves commissioned by the city of Brussels for the selection of an artwork for the new pedestrain bridge relating the area of compte de Flandre to the city center of Brussels.
abstract
Words inscribed in the urban context capture our gaze, a fleeting occurrence in our daily routine. The results of pure combinatorial logic, these words are displayed for the time that was necessary to generate them, as their rhythm is juxtaposed to the flow of the city. For a moment, an urban poem appears, a text without an author, evoking a stealth meaning, and thus giving free rein to our imagination.
text
Some Mathematics
The artwork is based on the three official, Dutch, French and German, dictionaries, without any personal editing or sorting. The choice correspond to the three official language in Belgium. The generation of the displayed word processes letter by letter, checking if the combination exist in one of these dictionaries, if yes, a third letter is drawn, if not, the system starts from scratch, until a 5 or 8 letter word is generated. In average it take 30min to generate a five letter word, a day for an eight letter word, and a month for a twelve letter word.
The language of the word results from the pure random, but pondered, drawing of the letters. The probability that a German word is generated is much higher then the one of a French or a Dutch one, since the amount of five to twelve letter words, is more then double. Further there are more different letter combination in German then in French as some letters, like K, are rarely used. In order to balance, to ponder, the system, we used statics and probabilities.
public artworks by the Belgian artstudio LAb[au], laboratory for art and urbanism, atr&language, art&architecture crossing conceptual art, kinetic art, digital art, konkrete
bottom of page