Casey Reas Eyeo talk on chance operations
How are you planning to incorporate random elements into your work? Where do you feel is the optimum balance between total randomness and complete control?
Before answering this questions, I wanted to implement by myself the concepts the video was talking about. Randomness. One quote by Casey Reas really stayed with me: “change it by a little so that movement creates chaos in an ordered way.” And I think that perfectly represents what I was trying to do in my work. The things I changed to create this element of randomness were data, small pieces of data that might seem insignificant at first, but machines are built based on that, so even the smallest thousandth can make a difference.
This brings me to another quote from the video, about Dadaism: “Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today with an illogical nonsense.” To what point is something considered logical? Computers are supposed to be based on pure logic. And yet, artists find ways to turn that logic into illogical sense. And yet, it still has meaning. It’s like deconstructing the logic embedded in the machine with the purpose of illogically creating something that has meaning behind it. Or the other way around, creating something without meaning by using the logic of the computer. Either way, I feel this can be applied to the artworks shown in the video.
A quote by Gerhard Richter captures this idea very well: “Above all, it’s never a blind chance; it’s a chance that is always planned but also always surprising.” These artists construct from chance as a base. It’s about bringing in disorder that has been curated with intention, in a way that even surprises the artist themselves. I think that finding this balance between total randomness and complete control is about using logic and repetition, patterns and algorithms that allow you to repeat a process, while the outcome is completely different, but the essence of it remains present.
Something that really caught my attention in the video was the idea of the million random digitized values and the 1,000 normal deviates. It honestly amazed me to think about the power, the expectation, and the importance that randomness has in our lives when we understand that art imitates or simulates the real world, and the real world is chaotic and not curated by anyone, but rather filled with randomness. Without a doubt, this video and this work opened my eyes and helped me understand even better the importance of chaos within order, and order within chaos.