One of the reasons we chose the very broad theme of ‘luck’ for our open call show As Luck Would Have It was to encourage a diverse range of responses and interpretations. Printmaker Ted Ollier took ‘luck’ to mean ‘randomness,’ and created a visual representation of a small bit of random data that we interact with in our daily lives. His Random Chroma Bands Type C series turns Two-Factor Authentication codes he received into a colorful pattern; read his full statement about the project below.
Random Chroma Bands Type C/p: 521964, archival inkjet print
Random Chroma Bands Type C/p: Grid of 361, archival inkjet print
Random Chroma Bands Type C illuminate and abstract a very commercial form of randomness now encountered on a daily basis. Whenever you sign in to your bank, shop on Amazon, or book something on Airbnb, you’re likely to be using 2FA, or Two-Factor Authentication. Once your login is entered at the relevant site, a code is sent to your phone or email address, and you use that to confirm the login. However, you only have ten minutes to act, before that code expires.
Well, these codes are little six-digit snippets of on-demand randomness. They are supposed to be inimitable, unpredictable, and evancescent. They provide the seed for generating the Random Chroma Bands. In these pieces, I have taken the resulting digits and encoded them further using my alphanumeric synaesthesia — the colors I associate with each of the ten ordinal digits. The six numbers become six identical bands of color that still retain that numerical information, just not as numbers.
This renders the random number string into an aesthetic design, which can be appreciated by itself, or in groups with other Random Chroma Bands. In the grid piece displayed, 361 of these codes, specifically drawn from my personal PayPal account, have been turned into a 19x19 grid of bands that interplay and weave with each other in a way perhaps not quite envisioned by the developers who programmed this process.
Ted Ollier was born in the Midwest, lived in the South, and now resides in the Northeast. He has been a photographer, graphic designer, bass player, typographer, web pioneer, informational leafblower and armchair philosopher. He has also worked a variety of day-jobs, the details of which are not terribly important.
He holds degrees from the University of Texas, Texas State University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. At present, he is a printmaker and conceptual artist working in the Boston community of Medford. He teaches letterpress and design through the Harvard Extension School at the Bow & Arrow Press in Cambridge. Ollier is the Pressmaster of Reflex Letterpress in Charlestown.
His concerns are with data and its interaction with the consensus reality, and how that reality is affected and changed by that data. Oftentimes the simplest visual representation of a dataset is enough to engage the viewer in ways far beyond the naïve reading of that information. Although the didactic element of information transfer is always present in his work, his true focus is on revelation and enlightenment, and the joy of finding a previously-unnoticed detail in the landscape of life.
He lives with a patent attorney, a small human, a chow mix and a red tabby.