Marc Lee’s project ‘Airport Lounge’ has been mentioned in The New York Times, in an innovatively illustrated piece.
A Case for Keeping it Random
By Alexis Kleinman
Marc Lee, a Swiss artist, also makes art for and with the internet. His project “Airport Lounge” shows social media posts sent from airport lounges laid on top of satellite images of airports. Lee doesn’t choose which posts end up in the piece. “I just take the newest social media posts,” he says. “It’s a strict concept. I always start with the youngest posts in the beginning. You never know who is posting what.” Without this randomness, Lee says, “the piece would not work.”
He isn’t interested only in the unpredictability of the internet and art; he also takes what he calls “random walks.” When he’s in a new city, he chooses a random starting point, turns off his phone and simply walks in a straight line. He follows the streets, but doesn’t use a GPS or map. He has taken these walks for six days in a row.
The goal is “to see things as they are, with no target and no plan,” Lee explains. The unpredictable walks shake him out of his routine and help him relax, he says.
For both Pozanti and Lee, random doesn’t mean aimless. “My randomness is very purposeful,” Pozanti says. “I wanted to keep a human element in the creation process, which is intuition.”
That may be what makes creativity effective. “The art that speaks to me most has some sort of inexplicable je ne sais quoi,” Pozanti says. “I like to see some sort of considered randomness.” Perhaps this speaks to us because humans actually run on randomness.