We live in an era of disciplines. Human nature’s inclination to have everything organized and well-structured always creates certain rules in any kind of field. I remember watching a video on YouTube of a college entrance exam for the School of Art in South Korea. Of course, all of the paintings were amazing, but it somehow made me think that the drawings were quite artificial. I felt like there was no creativity in terms of how those drawings were made. Particularly, it was like copying things in the world rather than engaging in a creative process. I love order and discipline, so I always tend to create certain rules, but in the art field, I find myself looking for something beyond the rules I know.
Reas’s talk was eye-opening for me in the sense that I found the answer to why I was searching for some sort of chaos in arts. The world is not structured in the way that we might expect. There is no such thing as absolute order. We always face unexpected circumstances that can entirely change the outcome. I found this pattern of unexpectedness very similar to the idea Reas was raising. The difference between chaos and order is not as huge as we might expect. A single change in the algorithm can turn the entire art piece into randomness. However, the act of letting randomness do its further work and create chaos is what makes art beautiful. We actually think of it as discipline, but we live in a lot of chaos. But that’s not necessarily wrong. It takes courage to break rules. But I think that courage can make us special. That kind of specialness is what I wanted to see in art.