Not gonna lie, I was not super excited when I loaded up the link and saw that the video was forty minutes long. But as I started watching it, I totally forgot about the time and just got interested in what Casey Reas was saying. The time passed much faster than I expected.
One of the first things he said was that artists brings order amongst the chaos that nature creates. And I’m not sure I really agree with that. But I also don’t know what artists do in that sense. Because they don’t necessarily bring chaos? Maybe they do bring order? But does nature bring chaos? There are so many ordered things in nature, between all of the patterns you find and the processes that keep it running smoothly, there’s not way it can be classified as “chaos”.
During the last lesson I didn’t quite understand what the purpose of “noise” was. The lecture really helped me understand it, though. The best example was that one where the lines all followed to the same target. If he didn’t add the noise, or “jitter”, then no matter how many lines he added, it would just be a perfect circle around the target. However, with the noise, you could see the individual paths that each line took to reach the target.
One of the distinctions that I was most passionate about that order does not mean unemotional. Order in art does not mean that no thought or emotion or style went into making the piece of art.