Many of the featured patterns and algorithms Casey Reas made are very elaborate and very satisfying to see the construction of. Some of them looked like something you might find in the default wallpaper collection you get from purchasing a new touchscreen device. From my perspective, a lot of these pieces could be implemented as a compliment to another primary work to elevate it. For instance with the colorful cancer cell visualization in the video– if I was a cancer cell researcher and I needed to present my research in a presentation I could use visualizations of my data as a design motif throughout my presentation template.
Halfway through the video he talks about chance in art and I was very surprised to see it appear as early as 1916. I think the most notable part of this section is Duchamp’s woodwork involving randomly dropping a piece of string to determine the line of hit cuts and ultimately the shape of the wooden planks.
I find it incredibly fascinating that before the random number game was an accessible computer-generated concept, it was first printed onto paper as a collection of deviatives. The fact that there was a whole book for random strands of numbers really changed my perspective on random numbers. Before watching this video, random numbers were entirely synonymous with random number generation(RNG) through computing. I think this is largely due to my exposure to RNG in video games, which can take many forms in video games from determining the chance of landing a critical hit on an enemy in an RPG to opening a fancy cosmetic in a live service first-person shooter.
Speaking of video games, I thought the featured example using “Fractal Invaders” was really cool and kinda shows how symmetry can turn nonsense into something that you would think had a deeper purpose. It looked like a really interesting idea with the mirroring so it made me wonder what results I could achieve if I did a similar coin toss black/white color decider for a 4×4 grid and mirrored it both vertically and horizontally. I imagine this would probably come up with some really interesting pixel art that could even inspire a more intricate hand drawn illustration based on that pattern.
Overall, I was really impressed with how people would obtain random numbers without computing them– from Duchamp dropping string to decide the line of his cuts to using a flipping through a page filled with random numbers. I think my perspective on chance operations has greatly broadened.
