After watching Casey Reas’ talk at the 2012 Eyeo festival, I was left questioning certain beliefs I held. In my mind, the distinction between digital and organic systems was like night and day. For example, Casey Reas’ earlier work is what I would have associated with computer graphics. Before watching this video, we had to make some computer graphics ourselves, and all of the ideas that came to my mind had one thing in common: order.
While trying to work on the second assignment, all I kept thinking about was how to recreate using code the vision I had in my mind. Not thinking of generating something I had no control over makes me realize that I was limiting myself to the idea that computer graphics had to have order.
Secondly, after watching Reas’ talk, I’m questioning what exactly it means to be alive. When he shows the grid of randomly generated pixels and adds symmetry to the randomness, suddenly faces and things I associate with living beings start to emerge. I do feel an urge to resist this association. Maybe it’s because my definition of life is tied with organic matter. I don’t have the answer to that yet.
However, when he shows the paths of vehicles and mentions that these would be perfectly similar to one another if not for the error, it made me think: is that not what life is? Living things fail and some win. Sometimes through sheer luck. Without random mutations changing us, we could have been single-celled organisms floating across the oceans. However, all the complexity that we see today was given rise to through that little bit of randomness causing some helpful instability.
With this in mind, I think I’ll let some randomness into my upcoming work. I’ve been trying to mold it to fit my vision so far, so it will be a fun change to incorporate an element of uncertainty into it.