Casey Reas’ exploration of the chance operations revealed this broad tension between order and chaos. He says artists are the ones who keep order, in the world of chaos created by nature. A world where chaos came first, before order was invented to control it. He talks about this concept of “controlled randomness”- where artists can set parameters and boundaries, while maintaining hints of chaos and randomness. He started generating code for art, where there were some shapes and lines, and some behaviours and processes which switches around and creates different pieaces – order is kept while chaos creates this little imprecision, a little flaw for aesthetic visuals. I particularly enjoyed his “Tissue Work”, I feel like it challenges plain, automatic art; art which lost its abstractness and humanity. The art code generated by Lia, when he says something along the lines of, “somewhere in those pixels is the difference between order and chaos” resonated with me the most. It was interesting to note how the dots deviated (chaos) from the grid (order), leading me to wonder- what if order exists everywhere and chaos is just its byproduct, contrary to what Casey says at the beginning of the talk? Casey Reas’ chance operations shift the narrative of an artist as a “keeper of order” to someone who controls the flow of chaos, and is always pleasantly surprised by its outcome. Even minor deviations in coding can lead to the creation of something inextricably beautiful, subtly suggesting that maybe chaos is not an opponent to creativity, rather a collaborator in the process.