Reading Reflection – Week 2

I found Casey Reas’ talk quite interesting as I discovered a number of new things I never thought of before. To begin with, as I have mentioned in this week’s assignment blog post, art is very subjective, and I feel that while some people can be fascinated by the art of chance and generative art as a whole, others will not even consider this art but rather set of unpredictable computer drawings that do not make a lot of sense. Personally, I am still not sure which side I belong to, but I really enjoyed watching the video as it gave me food for thought about the randomness implementation, and how it influences both physical and computer art.

First of all, there is a big difference between the randomness that humans create and the randomness that is generated by computers. It was unusual and captivating to see the pieces of art from the times before computers were invented, but I believe that as humans, we cannot ensure the complete randomness of our actions. On the contrary, computers are capable of producing chance operations that are much more unpredictable, and this is why it is important to control this process and find the right balance in order to get something that makes sense, something that can be called art. I was particularly impressed by the conceptual vehicles simulation (timecode: 9:03-10:00) that Casey Reas showed, and the way how he divided these random moves into stages and transformed them into drawings is interesting to think about. Overall, I agree with the ‘limitations’ of randomness that Casey Reas is setting in his works. In my opinion, a good thing to keep in mind is that I can always add some manual control to improve the visual effect of what was randomly generated, just like Casey Reas showed at the end.

In terms of my future generative art projects, I am definitely planning to keep the element of randomness as it surely adds uniqueness to the work. At the same time, I want to add more order, control, and interactivity for the user with what will be happening on the screen. As I watched the video after my assignment, I realized that although I tried to balance between ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ randomnesses, maybe it was not enough. In my next work,  I will do my best to find a better balance.