As a psychologist, I learned about chance, randomness, and probability through the scientific perspective. I learned that there is always room for chance when making conclusions, decisions, etc. Reas’ talk reminded me of this but also helped me to see the similarities and differences in understanding chance in arts and science. The most obvious difference is the people’s attitudes toward chance events. In medicine, for instance, people hope to minimize it and bring negative connotations to it, while artists look at chance as something positive, bringing more variability and opportunities in their works. Understanding such varied opinions on the chance concept, makes me think about humans’ urge for power. Power in medicine lies in the fact that scientists want to control chance and eliminate it. Artists want to have less control over chance in order to create works of art that can be powerful in the sense that they are decentered or are moving away from the preconceived traditional notions, e.g., symmetry, rationality, perspective, etc. This point was brought up by Reas and I find it extremely pleasing. However, I might wonder whether his opinion on moving away from “traditional” is a little bit biased in the sense that he talked about specific points of art history or coding when a radical change was necessary.
One idea from the talk which I agree with was that we are all similar in the fact that we are the key decision-makers in the process of choosing how much randomness we allow in our lives/artworks, etc. My key question to this would be how do we decide what is good or bad? Is it more chance or less chance? Although, the answer to this question depends on the context, how much of a chance we are truly capable of perceiving, welcoming, and approving? Moreover, because chance is something that in the long run emerges into something predictable, I believe that it is hard to make a clear judgment of whether chance is always surprising and always unpredictable, which can oppose people thinking of chance as something new.