When I was watching Casey Reas’ Eyeo’s talk on chance operations, I tried to bare in mind the question: “Where do you feel is the optimum balance between total randomness and complete control?”. Especially because I watched the talk after doing my artwork, I felt that the talk really aligned with the concepts that I envisioned for my assignment. For example, one example that he showed that left a lasting impression on me was Project Signals:
Basically, he explained that this artwork was a result of negative or positive communications that proteins sent within a cancer cell — essentially a visualization of biology data. Without this context, I would have assumed that it was professional art from a painter or such because of how beautiful it looked. This realization in the assumptions that I made, made me realize that there’s art everywhere and that rather than computers replacing artists, they can serve more as a tool to help us create naturally occurring phenomena into art.
Referencing back to the initial question, I think there’s an important point to be made about the balance between how much randomness we incorporate into an artwork. More specifically, I think that it doesn’t actually matter if an artwork is created totally randomly or with complete control. I believe that the beauty in creating art lies in artist autonomy, even with the uses of computer technology. Of course, for this then we would have to engage in the conversation about AI ethics (e.g. How much of the artwork is truly by the artist), but I think that might be a conversation for another day. Ultimately, I believe that what matters is the intention behind the creation, whether an artist carefully designs every element or embraces randomness as a creative tool, both approaches are valid. In my opinion, the interplay between control and unpredictability can lead to unexpected beauty, and that, in itself, is an artistic choice.