One thing that I, as an art history major, really enjoyed about Casey Reas’s talk on chance operations is the way he connected the topic to the Dada movement in art, referencing the desire of artists to break away from the pre-World War I conventions of logic and reason. However, as Reas proposes applying the same elements of randomness through generative computer algorithms to create art, I couldn’t help but begin to question its compatibility with my understanding of what constitutes art.
To me, art is something birthed by human deliberation; it encompasses the story, the soul of the artist. When we leave it to chance operations to work and create independently of the intents of the human artist, can we still consider it a meaningful, artistic creation? But just as Jackson Pollock was the one waving his brushes with much force for the paint droplets to create random patterns, the programmer is the one who sets up and sends the computer programs into motion in the first place, allowing these chance operations to create the unexpected. These pieces are not possible without the programmer setting the parameters, and while I do not have a definitive answer about whether this makes them real artists or not, I think it’s nonetheless interesting to see how the role of an artist evolves over time.