A dice roll is the very image of chance,
or put another way ...
A dice roll is the concretization of the random.
If you go to the online thesaurus Synonymordboka[1], you will, among other tings, find the following ...
to concretize (konkretisere) > make real / embody / materialize / realize / carry out
And further ...
to carry out (utføre) > produce / make / create
When I attended the art academy, I was searching for a way to work with art. A way where I could create by being in a kind of dialogue with something,
a material – exploring different concepts, conditions, and phenomena
– a way of thinking, through this practice.
Early on I described it like this:
- Artistic practice is for me a way of thinking. It is about an attempt to approach reality with all its nuances, and possible levels of understanding, through order, and through chaos, hopefully with an open eye for the unexpected and a new perspecitve on the familiar.[2]
This still applies.
Instead of taking myself as the direct starting point for artistic work,
I want to start from something else, from something ‘external’ that I can encounter. Something that also can lead me further in my artistic work,
to places I cannot necessarily imagine in advance.
For this to become a process where this form of thinking can lead me on unknown paths, it is interesting, and perhaps even necessary, to have a material that I cannot control.
The dice with their random numbers are such a material. I also like that dice
is man-made. Almost everyone has a relationship with dice – through play, games, and seriousness.
Randomness is something that appears in many contexts, and something
I consider to be a central part of reality.
We all experience randomness: situations that arise without us being able to see them as the result of any specific cause. Physics, among other fields, talks about cause-and-effect relationships – about causality; something follows as the effect of a cause. When no cause is apparent, no obvious cause, it is often called a random event.
Something that occurs randomly, can also be perceived as a mistake – it was not what one expected to happen. One may have thought one had everything under control, but something unexpected still happened – the result or effect was not as intended.
I see randomness as a kind of force – if one can use such a term for it –
in existence. It exists, we experience it. One can let oneself be irritated by it;
it did not go as one wanted or expected. One can also be positively carried away by it; I coluld not have thought of this myself, this was interesting.
What happens now? Where does it lead me?
Much of human activity is about managing processes – we control, systematize, and categorize. What do you do with what is not so easily controllable? How does one relate to the random? It is there – it is active,
in reality – alongside everything else, over which one have more control.
I find randomness interesting precisely because it is something that cannot
be controlled or directed. It adds something different to a planned process,
an element of something unknown. It challenges what I, perhaps without thinking, would otherwise have preferred – and it might lead me toward something beyond my personal choices, to something else.
The die is a physical object that generates randomness. I roll the six dice, collect the number sequences that arise in that action, and approach this particular material with something I can control – the development of sign-forms[*] for the numbers, and rules for how I use the material. However, I do not control the final outcome of the process.
Once sign-form and rule are determined, the rest of the process can follow the recipe. It becomes a kind of ‘blind’ transformation where I do not know what the outcome or result will be until the entire process is completed. It turns out the way it does – guided by the numerical material. The random, unknown and perhaps even unintended,
is part of a desired process.
The randomness in the project «one and one hundred dice rolls a day»
is therefore not just something that arises in the process, but an important foundation in my artistic practice.
In this project, nothing goes ‘wrong’ ...
the randomness reveals possibilities
the possibilities lead to variations
the variations lead further to diversity.
From the very beginning, I have thought of the numerical material from the dice rolls as a base material, like pigments are for a painter.
Then the questions follow:
What does this look like?
How do I start transforming the numbers?
How do I develop it further, and further and even further?
NRK Radio's popular science program Abels tårn, where scientists answer listeners questions, occasionally addresses the topic of randomness. The following two cases present something that I, with my perspective on the topic, find particularly interesting:
Mathematician Arne B. Sletsjøe (University of Oslo - UiO) spoke on September 8, 2023[6], about how randomness is an abstract concept, a bit like ‘infinity’. It is very difficult to create something random – that is, what we call independent events. He also said that
evolution is largely based on randomness, and that randomness in that sense,
can 'guide' a development – such as through mutations.
Physicist Anders Kvellestad (UiO) spoke on June 26, 2020[7], about two types of randomness. One is what he calls apparent randomness, like when you flip a coin or
roll a die. These are situations where you lack control, lack information. If one had all
the information and could have controlled the situation, one could theoretically have predicted the outcome. The other type is something that might be called actual randomness, which Kvellestad said can be found in quantum physics. In this field,
in the experiments they carry out, there are situations where one has all the information, but still cannot fully predict the outcome – whether the development will go in one direction or the other. Kvellestad believes that such actual arbitrariness, or randomness, therefore perhaps can be found at the very bottom of nature, in quantum physics
– perhaps.
On the Norwegian Wikipedia, the following is written
about randomness (tilfeldighet):
Randomness means that things happen without any particular reason or plan. It is when events occur without us being able to predict them. This often happens in nature and science, and it can be difficult to understand and control. We use mathematics called probability
to help us understand and describe random things.[5]
About the diversity and variations in this project.
Number of possible combinations[8]:
The first roll ...
6*6*6*6*6*6 = 66 = 46,656
With one roll per day, it would take 127–128 years before all statistically possible combinations are created
... and that does not take into account the «Coupon Collector’s Problem»[9] which complicates the calculation, the fact that you might actually get the same sequence/combination of numbers more
than once.
The next one hundred rolls, seen as one block ...
6600 = 7.8*10466
With 36,500 rolls per year, it would take 2.1*10462 years before all combinations are statistically made.
For comparison:
The age of the Earth is estimated at 4.54*109 years
and
the number of grains of sand on Earth is estimated at 7.5*1018
the number of stars in the universe at 3*1023
If you search for randomness (tilfeldighet) in the online dictionary Store norske leksikon[3], you get over 1,300 hits. The term appears in a wide range of contexts – including research methods, programming, genetics, composition, and art, among many others.
If you look up randomness (tilfeldighet) in the thesaurus Norske synonymer blå ordbok[4], you will find the words instance, arbitrariness, event, coincidence – and chance, which in turn is described with the words
stroke of luck, game of chance, and uncertainty, among other things.
And if you look at the word random (tilfeldig), you get, among other things, these words: aleatory, unforeseen, unsystematic, and unexpected, as well as words like episodic, fleeting, transient, momentary, and instantaneous.
1. Synonymordboka, «konkretisere».
2. Borg, «Texts».
3. Store norske leksikon, «Tilfeldighet».
4. Gundersen, Norske synonymer.
5. Wikipedia, «Tilfeldighet». My translation.
6. NRK Radio, «Abels tårn – Hvorfor», 40:50.
7. NRK Radio, «Abels tårn – Sommeravslutning», 36:00.
8. Mette Langaas (professor of statistics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology),
extract from e-mail correspondence January 6–7, 2011.
9. Wikipedia, «Coupon collector's problem».