Casey Reas’ talk at the EYEO festival 2012 gave a compelling reflection on the balance of randomness and control in the creative process. What I liked is how he showed us that even though artists use randomness in their artwork, they still have some control over it. This is something that I haven’t thought of before but now makes so much sense. The visual projects he created show exactly what he is trying to convince us. I really liked how all of his work showed randomness with some dosage of control and by combining these two he created beautiful unique structures. It is interesting how he wants to present coding as not just a technical skill, but also an art form. In the “10 PRINT” example he showed us, we had a chance to see how even a simple line of code can create beautiful, unique and diverse structures that create the digital art as we know it.
This talk did get me thinking though. Is it even possible to create something that is completely random? Because Reas makes an argument that artists and coders still do have some control over the artwork they are creating, does that mean that in order to create something truly random would mean that we need to bash our keyboard in order to type random letters in hopes some will combine into a sentence that is readable by the programming language? Maybe even the code alone, with its chaos, would be some sort of an art form? That is something Reas didn’t talk about but I think might be important. Can a chaotic code which is used to create randomness be used as art?
In my code I want to implement total chaos and randomness. I want the user to not understand what’s happening before they click to “freeze” the motion. This chaos and randomness when stopped will create a beautiful artwork which will of course every time be unique. But I am also keeping some control as from Reas example, I will be limiting some parameters of the random objects therefore making it somewhat controlled.