Casey Reas’ Eyeo talk on chance operations highlights two important themes- chaos and order. He uses a mix of both chaos and order in many of his projects. It is very interesting when he uses chaos and order to visualize aspects of reality, such as biological data, specifically proteins communicating with a cancer cell through signals. A point I captured in this video is that adding a slight bit of noise keeps it more homeostatic and away from order – I understand it as a way to create a sense of randomness, or more objectively, pseudo-randomness. Tuning a group of objects with the same rules creates “behavior” for that group. I am surprised to see how incorporating pseudorandomness into multiple groups with different behavioral rules adds a layer of complexity. I was struck at the consideration of observing the visualizations of the paths these objects take, rather than the placement of each object at a given moment; not only does this suggests I should consider art visualizations from multiple perspectives (not just position in multiple timeframes but velocity over time) but also acts as inspiration for a potential future project.
Casey Reas mentions that we can actually control how much we want to tailor or customize and leave to chance. This means we can decide the balance between total randomness and complete control, by setting quantitative figures on scalar, angle or colour randomness. As I considered where I feel is the optimum balance between total randomness and complete control, I was left with a question instead: is there an optimum balance between the two? I personally felt there is no wrong balance as long as tuning the two allows the artist to obtain the objective of the artwork.
I would like to incorporate randomness in my work specifically through incorporating randomness in the scaling of spirals, as well as amount of tilt. Beyond the visual arts, this video did raise a surprising idea of experimental music by random chance operations, such as in duration or pitch, which could be a great idea to try out in the future.