This week we had to watch Casey Reas’s talk on randomness and computational art. One example that related to me most was his demonstration of controlled randomness as a new creative medium. His example of an 11×11 grid of dots demonstrated this perfectly as the dots moved with increasing random constraints, they transformed from orderly patterns into seemingly chaotic movement. This progression raised a question: at what point does controlled randomness become indistinguishable from chaos?
I don’t believe there’s a definitive answer to this question, which connects to broader philosophical debates about the nature of art itself. Can art truly be controlled, or does its essence lie in the unpredictable? This becomes even more interesting when considering symmetry in computational art. By introducing simple random elements, we often perceive meaningful shapes and patterns, even when those elements are generated through chance, like the pixel art example. This suggests that our interpretation and meaning, making as viewers is as crucial as the artist’s intention.
Reas’s point about how minor parameter adjustments can produce entirely new artistic outcomes resonated strongly with my own work. In this week’s assignment, I experimented with adjusting particle colours and sizes based on the number of connected particles, and witnessed how small changes created dramatically different visual results. This reinforces how computational art explores vast creative possibilities through systematic variation.
Finally, Reas’s discussion of exploiting machine systems and their unique characteristics highlighted an important aspect of digital art, the same foundational artistic concept can be expressed differently depending on the computational system used. To me, this shows how computational art differs to traditional art in the sense that once a piece of ‘traditional’ art has been created, it can’t be changed in its entirety. Whereas computational art can be changed depending on machine type, revealing another layer of computational art.
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