I enjoyed Casey Reas’s talk on the randomness, and how the chaos of randomness can sometimes be turned into art. I love the concept presented — of making order out of chaos, as noise exists all around us. Computers were once thought to be orderly machines, that would calculate the exact same result every time it is run. In an already-chaotic world, why would one introduce chaos to one of the very few things that are orderly? Yet, I think that managed chaos can be beautiful. Renaissance paintings are considered good art, but they are not perfect. Simply because of the fact that it exists in the real world, there are always minor deviations even in a perfect brush stroke. Each individual hair in a brush creates enough deviation that no two brush strokes are the same, and somehow those minor deviations are what gives character and life to the drawing. In digital drawing apps, it would not be difficult to create brushes that always produce uniform results, but yet, noise is artificially added in to mimic brushes in the real world, intentionally creating chaos and randomness.
Something that I’ve been thinking about in context to P5.Js and randomness is that I won’t be fully able to control the user experience of the output. What if the randomness I’ve implemented spits out a ‘bad’ output for a certain user? But the more I thought about it, the less likely that sounded to happen. Order from chaos was the moral I’ve learnt from Casey Reas’s video, and I must constrain the randomness in a way that’ll look like something I expect most, if not all the time. A sketch of 10 randomly generated points might sometimes gets me a good result, for example 10 points shaped like a heart or a box, but most of the time it will just give me something that makes no sense. Perhaps then, it might make more sense to generate 10 points in the shape of a heart, but with minor, randomly generated deviations in it’s coordinates so that the heart looks jittery which might be more interesting than a perfect heart. The BASIC lines program of infinitely generated forward and back slashes. If every viewer generates 500 characters of the program, the chances of two viewer having the same outputs of /\/\ would be (1/2)^500, infinitesimally small. It is likely that two users have never seen the same output, but yet the program generates a neat, pleasant-looking output no matter how often it’s run. Perhaps that the idea behind randomness.