Before watching the video, I assumed that “randomness” in art meant something purely spontaneous—an idea that suddenly appears in an artist’s mind. After watching it, I started to understand randomness differently. In generative work, the artist often writes a set of rules or instructions for a computer (or a system) to follow. The computer then runs those rules, and the final image can turn out in ways the artist didn’t fully predict. That surprise is part of the point.
But this also makes me wonder: is this still “randomness”? If the artist designs the rules, then the outcome isn’t completely uncontrolled. At the same time, the result can still feel unpredictable. The projects shown in the video seem to hold both chaos and structure at once—patterns emerging from something that still looks messy—and that combination is what confuses me.
This connects to a larger debate about whether AI-generated work counts as “real” art, and if it does, who the artist actually is. Is it the person who sets the prompts and constraints, or the AI that produces the final output? Generative art raises a similar question. The human chooses the system, the limits, and the type of randomness, but the machine carries out the process and generates the final form. In a way, the artwork is created through collaboration between human intention and machine unpredictability.
At the same time, I keep coming back to the purpose of this kind of work. Are we amazed mainly because a system can produce something that looks complex and meaningful from simple rules? And what happens if nothing surprising appears—if the output feels flat, repetitive, or uninteresting? Would it still count as art, or would it just feel like a technical exercise? These questions make me realize that “randomness” in generative art isn’t the absence of control—it’s more like a tool the artist uses to invite uncertainty, so that structure and surprise can exist together.
In my project, I think I have to set up some boundaries, but at the same time leave the computer some spaces that it can actually have options. But I am still very confused about what counts as a success in such an art project? This kinds of process is confusing: we are doing something logical and follow the instructions but we expected something unpredictable and surprising.