Reading Reflection – Week 2: Casey Reas

The video opened my eyes to the possibility of making art with the random function. I’ve used the random function before in my code for my computer science class in high school, like to generate a random number for a user to guess; but I never thought of it to be used in code to make art. After watching Casey Reas’ video, I was reminded of a TikTok video of someone using code to make an image from a single branch and over time branches off into a tree. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now that I know what ‘randomness’ can do, I think a random function was used in the making of that tree. If I could find that video again, I’ll definitely take a closer look and see how randomness was used in the making of that art piece.

What interested me the most is how you can combined technology and non-technological ideas to make art. In the example from the video, it’s biological ideas. From an interpretation of nervous systems to computing art; this pipeline is one that I have not seen before and definitely not one I’ve thought of. So it’s something I want to explore myself. Maybe not with nervous systems, but what came to mind is how massive objects have a higher gravitational force compared to less massive objects (think sun vs planets) and it would be interesting to make code and make art using this idea.

Leave a Reply