I found Casey Reas’ talk on Chance Operations highly interesting. As a biologist, the part I myself found most interesting was Reas’ Tissue work, which was based on neuroscientist Valentino Baitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology and On the Texture of Brains, books that have become hallmarks in conceiving emergent behaviors from even simple sense-response loops in cybernetics, like a vehicle moving towards the nearest light source. I found it interesting how the different ways of wiring the sensory and motor “neurons” had an impact mainly on the vehicles’ behavior on approaching the light source and beyond. I also loved how he was able to create pretty good-looking artwork just from tracing the random paths of these vehicles, though I realize that he probably had to run it several times more than the number of prints in order to get the most aesthetically consistent results.
Another part that I found interesting was Rosalind Kraus’ scathing review of modernist grid art, a review that Reas unexpectedly cherished. I skimmed over Kraus’ original article (which is 15 pages long) and found that a lot of the seemingly negative aspects of grid art were less coincidental and more deliberate. This is especially true for the complaint about grids being temporally removed from all art preceding it. As Reas mentions in his talk, a lot of modern, postwar art was born from the feelings of despair against both modern science and historical traditions, both of which had combined into the vitriol that fuelled the World Wars. Thus, it only makes sense that art produced in this period similarly reject the traditions that art was built on, becoming abstract to the highest degree in the form of grids.