For the last 15 years much of my visual work has involved computer chips. Mostly I make mixed media pieces with the hardware though I’ve built large sculptures as well. Through my work with chips I explore the persistent yet potentially unanswerable metaphysical conundrum of the existence of a greater purpose and direction. The hardware of the chips serve as an auspicious sign of complexity. Like most humans, I need to believe that there is– overall– more order than chaos. Stripped of their purpose, the chips become relics of a kind of hypercomplexity; the design of the materials presents a mechanism of possibilities, which is then manipulated by software to wield more possibilities, from which point even more possibilities materialize by our will. Although the raw material may be amoral, by the influence of our will, they can create further order but also chaos. In my work, the chips themselves serve as evidence of our ability to create order, but they are overwhelmed by images and objects representing the reality of the situation: there is both order and chaos, creation and destruction, progress and regression. To contemplate a universal order may be a wasteful endeavor, but being open to the potentiality of a greater force compels thought, and that compulsion is expressed in my work. ~Carolyn Colsant
