Casey Reas opens with a traditional understanding of order and chaos. “Chaos is what existed before the creation, and order is what was brought by a God or gods into the world.” More generally, then, chaos is the natural state of things, and it is the hand of a higher being that brings order to chaos. But I struggled to meet Reas at his point of departure: is a higher order of being inherently correlated with higher capacity for order? God might have set the planets into motion, but their orbits remain subject to the unbound randomness of the universe. A meteor could very well strike Pluto today and move it off course by a few degrees. Would that still be God’s doing? I think that if the order brought on by even a God is not impervious to the seemingly ubiquitous and natural chaos of the universe, then even the little order we observe is only an isolated fragment of the bigger piece in chaos, meaning there is always net chaos in the universe.
Reas’s whole premise of incorporating randomness in art is to me an expression of the general human conceit. We like to think of ourselves as beings capable of creating and maintaining order. But then in the face of the infinite chaos of the world we live in, we go on and generate artificial randomness, in art and what not, as if by adding just a bit of chaos into the grand sum, we can rise to the ranks of the forces behind the universe. Take Keith Tyson’s sculptures for example, as discussed in the talk, and which reminded me of Mondrian’s paintings. Tyson tried his best to arrive at pure chaos, by allowing the shape and form of his sculptures to be dictated by dice rolls. But then Reas mentions that “he sent an algorithm to a gallery, which was then fabricated.” By incorporating an algorithm, basically a set of rules, in the manufacturing process, Tyson succumbs to his mortal fate, that of a creature of order, but still below the highest power in the universe, chaos.