Tripolar was commissioned for the Whitney Museum's CODeDOC project. The project explores the relationship of artists code to their finished work and reveals the code first, the gateway through which the work must be experienced.

Tripolar simulates a pendulum swinging above three magnets. The program draws the complete path that a pendulum would follow if it were released above the table exactly at the mouse point. This is a well-known chaotic system - very small changes to the starting position produce large changes to the path and which magnet on which it unltimately ends. The program drags the starting position slowly towards the actual mouse position, so that one can explore points between pixels, simulating a screen resolution hundreds of times the actual pixel resolution.

The source code demonstrates the "meta-chaos" of the program itself. A set of key variables defines all the parameters of the simulation. Changing any of these parameters radically alters the artwork, in most cases making it non-functional - in some cases the program will hang, in others the paths will explode, implode or oscillate.

By its title, the program is also meant to suggest the connection between mental states and these chaotic phenomena - even small, simple physical systems are as unpredictable and sensitive to initial conditions as our own minds. Chaos and complexity reign at all scales.

CODeDOC at The Whitney Museum
Tripolar