After giving Casey Reas’ presentation a watch on behalf of my consideration for what to try out within a coding artwork of mine, it has led me to think about how I wish to incorporate random elements into my works. Perhaps one way that I can incorporate random elements in my work is if there are certain shapes and/or colors that I find myself stuck with or wish to keep as simple as possible. For instance, if I were to try creating an art pattern of lines that I wish to be originally different but don’t know how, I would turn to my code and attempt to apply requests for random elements to be used within each line. Whether it be the shapes that shall be chosen to be featured in each alternative line or the colors randomly given a separate line to represent, the random elements at hand will still share the purpose of helping make my artwork look somewhat original in a sense. But of course, this will be after I share with the coding certain rules of what boundaries/minimum limits to respect and how to at least stay on track. I am still giving the code freedom to create each line featuring an alternate shape/color of the code’s random choice; I am simply letting the computer know the rules of what lines not to cross and how to stay in touch with the goal of creating the artwork without going off-track.
With this in mind, this is why I believe that the optimum balance between randomness and complete control is the presence of rules/expectations of you, yourself, the artist. If one technically thinks about it, without any rules/expectations set for the computer to follow and remember while writing the code for your masterpiece, the computer is going to get convinced that it is free to do whatever it believes is best, and thus create an artwork that is the complete opposite of what you could be looking for. Sure, it will score enough points for trying to be unique and original with its choices of art style on your behalf, but it will lose points in acting with such intention in a careless and rather messy manner. Not to mention that in the world of art, it is almost impossible to execute the concept of artwork that represents some sort of meaning despite its messy appearance. That still doesn’t mean that the chance to create a compelling yet kind of messy artwork can be never reached; it just needs to meet the requirements of how to not go overboard with its creation in which it all lies on your hands to place forth for the computer to take note of.
The bottom line is that any artwork is still free to incorporate random elements into their work for the sake of thrilling mystery, it just calls upon you, the artist, to monitor the workings of the computer in order to see if its random choices are going along with your plan. It can point towards checking how far in height/width the computer is expected to reach while conducting its random outcomes, or even the amount of ordinary elements that it uses and how many times they’ve used otherwise. It all comes down to the idea of being fair with not just yourself but also with the computer as well. It perhaps can be seen as an example of equal collaboration that any artist should always open towards. Overall, this is all of my thoughts in regards to the idea coming from Casey Reas’ presentation.