Sometimes the cards are so accurate, the questioner can only believe he or she has had a level of agency in their selection and arrangement, one beyond the mere shuffling of the deck. To parse out this seeming contradiction (there’s that fucking word again), I consulted the Skry-Pod creators, went to the caped wonders themselves. As ever, FASTWÜRMS are always ready to illuminate, charm, and (yes!) contradict themselves, or at least their own aesthetic paradigms. No dogma-plagued hobgoblins, FASTWÜRMS have minds as wide as a Creemore night sky, and can (and do) build tents big enough to hold any number of delightfully un-foolish inconsistencies. Emerson would have loved them. I sure do.
RM Vaughn: What role does Chance play in Skry-Pod? FASTWÜRMS: Chance is a dynamic element in the Skry-Pod performance: Tarot cards as a rational structure with irrational content. Aleatory systems are by definition irrational. RMV: Why did you choose to load a Tarot deck onto an iPod? FW: What attracted us to the iPod was the possibility of using algorithm-generated chance vs. the ‘true’ random outcomes of card shuffling. (This is our enactment of a somewhat arcane philosophical problem in mathematics.) In real-world gambling this is a pragmatic problem. We discovered that in high stakes Las Vegas card games, they still default to a process of complicated human hand shuffling instead of trusting their very expensive state-of-the-art card shuffling machines. RMV: So, Chance is, counter-intuitively speaking, reliable? FW: The essential interaction of irrational and chance elements in creative systems like evolution, the formation of the solar system, the birth of the universe, this is what SkryPod reflects and generates in the psyches of participants.
NMP
41