Casey Reas’ presentation gave me several insights about the role of chaos in computing visual art. I never stopped to think about these concepts, but the more examples I saw, the more I understood their importance. As Reas was showing some of his work throughout the presentation, I quickly realized how superior the works he was not in “control” were in comparison to his highly fixed ones, which were just simple shapes as opposed to aesthetically pleasing and complex pieces generated by chaotic code. This dynamic interaction between human intent and machine generated randomness not only can produce captivating art but it can also deepen our understanding of mathematics. The generated outputs were so interesting that Reas even ended up using them in clothing, showing the power of computing when it comes to art. The examples from other authors also gave me inspiration for the loops assignment.
Additionally, something that caught my attention was the process behind coming up with these codes. Reas mentioned that one of his projects took a year of planning before he actually started to code, he also mentioned at some point how he went through hundreds of different generated outputs for the same project, which makes me wonder how long on average it takes to come up with these designs, and how much of it is simple trial and error or hours and hours of analyzing and writing algorithms to come up with something idealized. Perhaps it is a mix of both, as mentioned in the quote: “It’s never a blind chance, it’s a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising”
In short, although I am more interested in the presented visual aspects as opposed to mathematical ones, these are still beautiful concepts to take a look at and appreciate the hard work and complexity that goes behind the scenes.