What Casey Reas was trying to show through his talk was the usage of “controlled chaos” through an artistic manner. He gives many examples of art pieces that he took part in where through his code, he determines how much of the piece he was to leave up to chance. Within my own work I aim to start incorporating randomness within my work through noise and random numbers to determine different aspects of my work like colors or placement. Through watching the talk, I believe the optimum balance depends on the specific works, but it really comes down to utilizing randomness in a way that is still cohesive to the work as a whole. For example, in a music piece, if incorporating randomness, you may not want the timing and the notes to be completely random, sounding like a complete mess, instead, you may want to incorporate randomness and chaos in a way where the piece still works nicely together.
One example piece that he showed during the count that stood out to me the most was the one line algorithm in the commodore 64. Even though it was simply just an algorithm that does a simulation of a coin flip, where one results prints a character and the second result prints a different character. This randomness creates a very unique piece of art that, to the human eye, may look like order. Although this piece was very simple, I found it to be the perfect balance of order and randomness.