Artwork > A Cube is a Rectangle - Series C

A Cube is a Rectangle (Series C) is a modular artwork that currently contains 10 to the power 20 permutative possibilities.

Each "image" begins as a unique entity. The "standard" isometric Würfel that Burtonwood has been drawing since 2022 is doubled in size and broken into four symmetrical quadrants. Each quadrant is drawn upon Bristol vellum and mounted to a panel. Each panel has a metal cleat on the back that interlocks with a base board. The base board has four cleats that accept the four quadrants and in turn attaches to the wall.

Each quadrant is indexed based on its original state. For example, the bottom left of version 1 is Series C.001A. Bottom right is Series C.001B. Top left is Series C.001C and top right is Series C.001D. Quadrants are indexed in this fashion because the cleat system requires that A and B be installed prior to C and D.

In this fashion the top left quadrant from Series C.001 can be swapped with the top left quadrant from Series C.004 or 005 or any version in the series.

For the duration of the exhibition "Difference and Repetition" at Bert Green Fine Art in Chicago the eight Series C works on exhibit are reconfigured using a random system to change the positions of quadrants from the four sets A-D. Each Friday afternoon Burtonwood visits the gallery and uses a random number generator to change the position of each quadrant and notates these changes on a worksheet that he dates and records the iteration number.

So far he has used two slightly different methods over four iterations. The first method which has been used three times is simply to change the position of each quadrant based on its last relative position. In this fashion Burtonwood first rolls 1-8 to determine which “Image” is first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. In this fashion he initializes the start position and order of operation.

Then Burtonwood determines where quadrants A-D move to. For example he begins with “Image 1” and rolls first for quadrant A rolling 1-8. If he rolls a 1 then it remains where it is and if he rolls a 5 it goes to the new position for “Image 5.quadrantA.” He repeats the process for all 8 images - and all 32 quadrants notating each new position. When he gets to 2 remaining quadrants in order to simplify the process and time spent he writes down the two remaining “Image “ numbers numbers that been called and then abbreviates them so that a roll of 1-4 will be the remaining low number and therefore a roll of 5-8 will be for the remaining high number. E.g. if the remainder for quadrant A is 5 and 8, a roll of 1-4 == 5 and a roll of 5-8 == 8.

Burtonwood has also deployed a system to move all the quadrants in a linear direction. In this instance the initialization changes the order so that “Image 5” becomes “Image 1,” and then what was “Image 6” now becomes “Image 2.” In this method everything is then moved in a linear fashion left to right, with 8 leading to 1 in a loop.