Reflection:

After watching Casey Reas’ Eyeo talk, I found it very close to my own thinking. I grew up with an artist as a dad, and not just any artist, a cubist. What is cubism, you may ask? It’s a unique and funky type of art that blends different shapes and can be read differently depending on the angle you look at it from. The kind of cubism I grew up seeing also packed ideas, experiences and emotions into a single painting, leaving the viewer to guess what is going on and to find an angle nobody else had found.

That shaped how I look at art. My dad used to bring his work home and make me guess what was happening in it, so I learned to read a painting emotionally and from a perspective different from everyone else’s. This is why the talk resonated with me: art is not cold or unemotional. Every piece carries its own meaning and its own way of thinking about how the artist wanted it to reach people. What’s funny is that sometimes I would see something in his work from a perspective he hadn’t considered himself, and that is exactly what makes it beautiful.

I intend to use randomness to give my work the spark it needs. Random motion in one of the shapes, or a sudden loop of shapes overlapping the piece, could make it better than it already was. It would also create a kind of illusion, pushing viewers to think more deeply about the work instead of just staring at a controlled image, and having the viewers look at my art at different angles.

As for the balance between randomness and control, I don’t think it’s something to stress over. Writing the code is the same exchange I grew up watching: you set the rules the way my dad set his shapes, and what comes out can still surprise you, just as I sometimes found things in his paintings he had never intended. Control gives a piece the stamp of the artist’s own style, while randomness can push it somewhere nobody imagined. A piece can look like it only has one way of being seen, but the beauty comes from people finding perspectives the artist never did.