Watching Casey Reas’ talk influenced the way I think about randomness in interactive artwork. It made me reflect on how, in traditional art, we often try to control every aspect of every element. I typically do not plan every aspect of my own art pieces; sometimes I go with the flow, and sometimes I see where my thoughts take me. However, Reas’ discussion of “systems” rather than “images” challenges my creative process.
This raises the question of when computational art is truly random, or whether it is our own thoughts and decisions that contribute to the apparent randomness of the work. I wonder how much control I actually have over “chance” in a digital system and whether the unpredictability is generated by the algorithm or by the choices I make in setting up the system. This makes me reconsider the balance between control and randomness in creative processes.
So, I want to say that randomness is still a type of control because I think we will never achieve full randomness. This is evident in chaos theory: in a small picture, it looks chaotic, but as we zoom out to see the full picture, it becomes more evident that it is a longer form of a pattern, more complex, yet there is still some type of control.