Random(ish)

Dave Nix

October 10 – november 5

Artist Statement

Random(ish) is a visual survey of a designer’s circuitous path of inquiry through seemingly disparate disciplines — a journey arriving at an embrace of randomness in its many forms and how it helps us discover, explain, and enrich the world around us.

From slogging through rice paddies in Vietnam to traversing manufactured landforms in urban Bangladesh, from a building technology laboratory in Japan to a grad school computer lab, from the Philadelphia urban planning department to founding an MIT-spinoff technology startup, Nix (’08) has snapped photographs, researched sustainability policy and greenhouse emission trends, programmed physics simulation engines and solar power generation forecasts, analyzed complex real estate transactions with non-deterministic financial models, designed a 20-story building with parametric and algorithmic tools, visualized photorealistic scenes of the impossible, and taught computers to see and verbalize the world.

The movement of photons, real and virtual. The uncertainty of finance over time. The forecasting of energy generation. The way machines learn signal from noise. A guy getting lost on all sides of the world.

All with randomness. (More or less.)
David Gordon Nix is a designer and technologist. Energized by his experience in the civic, private, and academic realms in the US and abroad, Nix is interested in the synthesis of design thinking, business, and technology to enrich cities and urban living — from innovative real estate solutions and sustainable building design to clean energy and forward-thinking consumer software. Nix studied Studio Art and East Asian Studies at Wake Forest (2008), was a Fulbright scholar at Tohoku University in Japan, and has a Masters of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.