This talk was very interesting to me, particularly the parts about chance in art and code.
The second Reas started talking about Jean Arp’s artwork, the one about dropping the pieces of paper and just leaving them there, I immediately thought of the concept of “happenings”. Allan Kaprow introduced “happenings” in the 50s as an artistic event which employs randomness and improvisation, particularly in performance art. They typically required the participation of the audience, so the spontaneity of the happenings and the random environments in which they unfolded created an unpredictable result – one that Arp’s work resonates with. I was happy to see that Reas mentioned John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, as they are the predecessors of happenings. John Cage invented the technique of “prepared piano”, in which he would place different items on piano strings in order to change the way they sound. Marcel Duchamp emphasized the role of the viewer in art, affecting the way audience participation contributed to the artwork. His idea, which Reas evokes, that this kind of randomness and chance allows in a way to take a stand against authority, power, and order and to come back to our chaotic nature, is very striking to me.
Moving on to chance in code, I had actually never thought about it. Although I cannot say that chance in code is a happening, I really felt like it resonated with this “fight” against order and rationality. Reas says: “the idea of using a rational machine to do something unexpected was at the time very subversive”. In the demos he shows next, it is then interesting to see how the slightest randomizing in code impacts the images generated. Although codes are very structured, it is then very easy to create something completely unpredictable. This, then, echoes the very unpredictable nature of the results that happenings tried to achieve. In one of the demos, he mentions how one of the codes once mirrored creates images that we start giving meaning to, whether we see a face, a skull, an animal… It reveals how we as a society can make meaning out of art that perhaps was meant to have another meaning, or no meaning at all.