I was almost immediately confused as I started listening to Casey’s lecture. He mentioned that “order is what was brought by a God or Gods into the world.” I guess for a long time I assumed that humans were the ones trying to bring order into this chaotic world. But I just realized, it was only chaotic in our minds. All aspects of nature are, by themselves, so beautifully organized and fit together so perfectly; humans have only served to bring disorder. That’s also what makes this entire concept of “chance operations” interesting; if humans actually bring disorder to nature in the name of order, why are they trying to bring a sense of randomness into their art?
Looking at the various artworks Casey presented during his talk, I noticed that no artwork is truly completely random. Either they have some controlling criterion, for example, the artwork for which he stated, “putting the images wherever they wanted to be, with the constraint that they had to be at 90-degree angles”, or they appear to be random at the start and “order begins to emerge as they follow their behaviors”. That said, I don’t have a confident answer to what I feel is the optimum balance between total randomness and complete control, and I believe it’s a paradoxical statement for such artworks.
Casey provided the instructions for one of the pieces, which caught my eye:
Element 5
F2: Line
B1: Move in a straight line
B5: Enter from the opposite edge after moving off the surface
B6: Orient toward the direction of an Element that is touching
B7: Deviate from the current direction
I found it very interesting that it only took that one last step, and the ambiguity of the word ‘deviate’, to create the randomness in the artwork, because every other step is based on strict rules.
In my work, I hope to incorporate random elements in the form of colors, shapes, and the way in which they interact with each other and the canvas. Particularly in this week’s assignment, I experimented with the randomness of colors. So while I did set my own array of colors that the program chooses from, the frequency with which the colors are chosen and where they are applied for each constituting element of the image are out of my control. For this artwork, I thought this was a nice balance between randomness and control, so that the final image still bears a certain resemblance to Van Gogh’s original piece, and yet comes out different every time.