I really enjoyed this talk a lot! Casey Reas’ Eyeo talk on chance operations .
One of the main ideas I found very interesting was this idea of randomness. We discussed a bit about this already in class, but I thought I’d share my perspective on the topic. I do believe that in the grand scheme of things randomness may not actually exist. This can be especially true when discussing anything technology oriented, but from what I interpreted from the talk was something a bit more personal to the individual. To elaborate, I think randomness comes down to the individual’s perception of an event. Sure, if you give a computer a bunch of random coordinates and tell it to draw something, the computer will intake that information in a very logical and structured format and execute said command. What happens to the individual when perceiving this outcome is something quite different. Because our brains aren’t designed to function like computers, this creation by a random combination of digits appears random or out of character. You may even argue that randomness is simply something outside of our expectations or ideas, which once again goes back to what our individual perspectives are.
A helpful tip that I received from this video was the importance of structure with an element of surprise or randomness (excuse the redundancy). When creating art through a mechanism such as coding, one must not only understand the structure of building said creation (the logical part of the creation), but also open themselves to experimentation using our favorite word for today, randomness.