Rocks and Code was the subject of my MFA thesis (Rocks and Code (PDF) UCI, 2009), where I got to indulge research into a fairly narrow slice of the Cold War era, tying together landscape, random numbers, the history of computing, and the history of math tables, wrapped around the result of a road trip.
Besides the large PDF document above, the other major remnant from the project (which was a smallish installation at the 2009 ACE program graduating show at the Beale Center for Art+Technology) was the centerpiece of the thesis, my Atomic Number Generator, which generates true random numbers from radioactive decay of natural rock. Rocks to Code in one step.
I will try to transfer some of the contents of the installation to the web; unfortunately the installation wasn't well documented.
Abstract
This paper and the accompanying installation of the same title examines the interconnected histories of mathematical tables, computer development, nuclear physics, random numbers, and finally, the human pursuit of a reliable "anti-oracle" of impartiality in the midst of growing evidence of the bounded and constructed nature of science and technology and culture.
This work explores the need for mathematically rigorous random numbers, the results and ramifications of this obscure pursuit, and its effects on the earth and people that persist to this day. This paper draws a line through historic mathematical and scientific research that reaches into the present, and provides what I think is a unique view of past events.
I also look at some of the ways in which culture constructs belief systems around its relationship to the earth, nature and our relationships to ourselves, by constructing faux-objective, "external", dispassionate and "in-human" "unnatural" artifacts, in the form of scientific apparatus, in this instance for the production of random numbers, and tangentially, and to me bleakly humorous, the undoing of a crucial human cultural discipline 4500 years old, mathematical tables. The associated multi-media and sculptural installation makes some of these connections visible and humanly tangible, by combining nuclear ("atomic", in my preferred early cold-war parlance) decay, the production (and ruination) of math tables, and mining and poverty.
At the center of the installation is the Atomic Number Generator, an apparatus that conjures true random numbers from "natural" physical processes -- isotopic decay from natural rock; uranium ore mined largely by the misled, underpaid local, largely native, population of the American South West.