These combinations trigger different memories and associations in each viewer, in a sense working like Gertrude Stein’s grammarless Poetry in which word combinations and sounds conjure associations unique to each reader.

Podevin also mentions William S. Burroughs’ cutups technique in which the writer cut up pages of words and randomly rearranged the words to create new associations. The idea was that traditional syntax concealed as much as it revealed and that the new combinations of randomly arranged words created previously unsuspected connections and relationships.

I’ve been making by hand sketchbooks and journals for the last 20 years, explains Podevin. I must have about 110 of them. I wanted to make sense of it all, so I started to compare the images, one next to another, and I realized the various groupings of images took on a meaning of their own. I wanted to find a way to show that in a continuum, if you like, different meanings result from different combinations, these groups of pictures made sense.

Each image contains a basic archetypical situation of life, examined in various ways. I was left to find a way of putting these images in any combination of order, so I enlisted the help of my friend, a kinetic sculptor named Leland Means, who helped me to build the machines. So anyway, little by little I came up with these contraptions.

     Podevin’s first stochasticon featured a series of 52 images on several interwoven belts.

In this machine the belts story of weave themselves in an endless fabric, creating a metaphor of weaving as a creative act.

Podevin finds his random method of narration more realistic than traditional linear methods of storytelling.

One of the things that has always fascinated me is storytelling. I remember, as a child,  when someone told me a story, always found the end deceiving and often wished the story would go on forever. I never found a story’s ending, which  I feel is closer to life.Life doesn’t tell itself as a story with a finite ending; it has a floating, fleeting structure of its own that continues on. ( continued on page 2)