The Wine Dice is a decision making tool. Instead of the usual one to six, the Wine Dice shows five colours over the six sides, with red taking up two faces. This bias is included as a reference to my original study of 300 Wine Gums in Wine Games (2007), where approximately one sixth of the 300 sweets (50) were black, orange, green or yellow with the remaining 100 being red.
Wine Games was a sculptural assemblage of Wine Gums laid out in an algorithm-derived pattern on a chequerboard floor. This work applied this framework to new media theory, using Wine Gums as a metaphor for new media objects, with a particular emphasis on video games as a model for the algorithm. A single packet of Wine Gums contains 12 individual sweets. This work used 25 packets and 300 sweets in total, according to the following algorithm: Regulation -> colour sequence -> changing situation -> assemblage. The work represented this algorithm by placing the Wine Gums, starting from the middle of a corridor, as dictated by the random arrangement of colours that exist within each packet, with four different colours indicating a direction on the grid floor and black denoting a repetition of the previous decision.
London is composed of seven postcode areas, NW, N, W, the central areas WC and EC, E, SW and SE. If you exclude the postcode you live in or nearest to (in my case this is SW) you are left with six areas with which to work. These areas, when placed upon the faces of the Wine Dice, create the opportunity for an algorithmically determined cultural journey. Subsequent rolls of the Wine Dice narrow down your choices until a single exhibition venue remains.
My first Wine roll, using the exhibition listings from Saturday’s The Guardian: The Guide supplement as an anchor, tells me that here I will follow the red postcode areas (NW and W) which are comprised of 37 options. By assigning one of the six dice faces to each of the 37 options in order, you create a smaller sample for a second Wine roll. Having rolled an orange, I am now down to just six from the initial 95 options. After a third and final Wine roll (red), I have my location.
The Wine Dice is a response to the overload of today’s cultural and lifestyle choices, encouraging a less biased engagement with the arts. The symbolic postcode fragments reconfigure in order to create a personalised cultural catalyst device, leading to a choice based not on preconceived notions, but the spontaneous will of the Wine Dice, in this case a trip to W1 for a solo exhibition of new work by Michael Joo called Radiohalo (Blain/Southern, London, 2016).
Joe Stevens, (2007), Wine Games. Courtesy of the artist.
Joe Stevens
Joe Stevens graduated with an MA in Interactive Media from Goldsmiths in 2007. As a self-professed artist, athlete and academic, Stevens’ work has been included in exhibitions at The National Art Studio (Seoul, 2008), Tenderpixel (London, 2010) and HOUSE Gallery (London, 2014), opening events at APT and Goldsmiths (London, 2007), residences at IASK (South Korea, 2008) and Loopart13 (London, 2013) and publications in Rubric Journal (2009) and Mind Body Spirit (2012, 2013).
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