Tripolar animates the tangled, abstract, and ever-changing forms a pendulum makes as it swings over a magnetic base. It was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The drawings it creates, reminiscent of 1950s abstraction, are chaotic systems in which minute changes to the start position produce large changes in the pendulum’s path. By invisibly moving the starting position in microscopic increments towards your finger's position, Tripolar lets you explore points between pixels, simulating a resolution thousands of times that of the actual screen.
To further explore the boundary between a software artist's work and the interactive creations made with users of the work, this version of Tripolar allows you to move, add, and remove magnets to create an infinite array of configurations besides Tripolar’s original well-known configuration of three symmetric magnets. Touch the bottom of the screen to bring up these controls.