Red Copy, Blue Copy (2015)
Website Document
This animation presents two facsimiles of Book 66, an artist's notebook chosen at random. The notebooks are identical, save for their color, a device to highlight their status as reproductions. Book 66 was originally filled with notes and diagrams, anticipating its future use in a project such as this, and simulating the aesthetic of a working artist's notebook.
As the animation unfolds, the two notebooks desynchronize, loading and playing back at different speeds. This asynchronous movement generates unexpected alignments between the pages, causing objects and drawings to appear as though they are drifting between the two books. Over time, this drift continues, subtly altering the structure and relationships between the two facsimiles.
The work emphasizes the disruption of a controlled structure by unforeseen phenomena, where the planned synchronization of the books is gradually undone by the variability of their playback. Despite the artist’s best efforts to create a precise and cohesive system, the slow desynchronization hints at the limits of control. Even in the most meticulously crafted works, an element of unpredictability inevitably emerges, disrupting the intended order. This drift between the two facsimiles suggests that no matter how tightly one tries to contain a process, some forces—whether mechanical, random, or otherwise—slip through, subtly unraveling the structure and revealing the fragility of any attempt at perfect synchronization.