While listening to Casey Reas’s talk, I felt that he was insinuating that his best work is the one that arises when no control is there and when there is an extent of randomness. I beg to differ. The idea of randomness, in my opinion, means allowing the randomness to guide you to another step towards your goal or towards something that satisfies you. This should not be misinterpreted as the idea that randomness is bad. I think that randomness is beneficial when you’re not going rampant without an objective in mind. It can help if let’s say you’re creating a painting with a goal in mind of what aesthetic you want to go for. If your colors mix to create one not intended, or if certain objects or designs are placed at random, that is good. It helps you alter your perspective on how to go next to achieve your goal. Complete order is not the best. Because then you would get stuck if something goes amiss, instead of figuring out how this mistake can actually change your path or even add a new perspective or way to go on about things. He usually, i realized, only speaks only about randomness in a very black and white perspective using only the dicitionary surface level definition. He describes it as something almost intentional. I’m not sure if I fully agree with that particular perspective he had. This may lead people to actually strive for randomness, which is, in my opinion, absolutely not what randomness is. I believe that if it’s intentional, it isn’t really random. Now he brought up something interesting, which was Marcel Duchamp’s work. That particular point was one of the few points in the talk that almost shifted my perspective or opinion regarding Reas’s stand on randomness and order, and where I myself stand on that topic. After hearing about Duchamp’s work, I was intrigued by whether intentional randomness is considered randomness. Yet again, his work was a critique of order. So that raises the question of what randomness really is.
I wish to include randomness in my work by allowing things that go wrong in my work to simply guide me to a new perspective or way of doing things. For instance, if I were to make a mistake in a code for a project, instead of completely deleting or changing the code, I would see how I can actually use the error for my own benefit and use it to my advantage to give me a new idea, for example. I would not necessarily start a project blindly in the name of randomness; I would just use things that do not go according to my plan to help me find new ways to reach my target.
I believe randomness should not go uncontrolled. Uncontrolled randomness can lead you to forget about your objective, or it can completely go out of control, and you wouldn’t be able to fix certain things that went wrong and how to fix them, since everything happened randomly without a plan. If randomness is within a plan, I think that is optimal. If randomness is the sole driving force of a piece of work, I do not believe that is optimal or efficient.