Week 2 Reading Response: Casey Reas

In the realm of digital art, Casey Reas’s perspectives on ‘Order’, ‘Chaos’, and ‘Controlled Randomness’ are quite intriguing. Art was perceived as a conservatively rigorous field that necessitated meticulous, well-planned strategies in contemporary forms. Nevertheless, Casey proposes to broaden the definition of “Digital Art” through his views. His perspective on the use of algorithms and randomization as creative mechanisms enables the emergence of unanticipated patterns and themes that never would have been anticipated. He draws inspiration from historical examples from the 20th century and presents examples of how randomness can be incorporated into a creative process.

Casey’s “Process 18” is an appropriate example for this. Using parameters to control the extent of randomness is a subtle masterstroke as it is able to encompass the artist’s intentions and also show the creative factor. His work raises the question of whether the concept of “randomness” is genuinely random or if it is a more complex form of order that has yet to be fully comprehended. This phenomenon is also observed in other domains, such as the “Lava Lamps” of Cloudfare for secure data encryption, the “Quantum random number generator” of Google for the generation of random numbers based on quantum mechanics, and the “Ivy Bridge” of Intel for the generation of random numbers based on thermal noise.

I intend to integrate Casey’s perspectives into my work by employing parameters to produce unpredictable variations in my projects. These variations would be beneficial in assisting me in the exploration of a variety of aesthetics, patterns, themes, and interactions that are prompted by user inputs. These would ensure that my projects offer a distinctive experience to all users.

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