Rupert's Chaos at Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, 2011, and BOX LYNfabrikken, 2012
Rupert's Chaos is an exploration and coupling of two offhand disparate phenomena; the Prince Rupert's Drop and the Lorenz Attractor. The first is a glass droplet made from dripping molten glass into cold water to instantly cool the surface of the glass while building up tensile stress in the bulb of the massive droplet causing it to explode at any given moment. The latter is a mathematical model developed in the 1960's by the American mathematician, meteorologist and pioneer of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz, to describe chaotic systems.
The piece consists of an installation made up of hundreds of glass spirals and droplets hanging from a suspended wire system that spans across the room. The glass structure is at once delicate and dynamic, transparent and massive as it mimics the butterfly movement described in the Lorenz Attractor model. Four tall glass cylinders are filled with water and droplets that allow the viewer to come up close and study the phenomena while a looping video renders the phenomena in slow motion and a piece of wall text shows drawings from Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665).