From the introduction, I had the following thoughts. Reas mentions of how chaos in major events in history like prevalence of quantum mechanics and world war 1 led to shifts in art. This made me question of whether chaos around AI will lead to shifts on how art is formed and viewed. Reas then continues talking about how software art is effected by noise while I understand what noise he is referring to; I think about how noise doesn’t allow me to focus while making art and how the same word could have such different impacts and meanings.
He then mentions Valentino Braitenberg as a neuro-atomist and his work about an imaginary robot to study about cognition. I really liked the crossover between art, math, and science. I read more into these robots and found how one robot’s motion was effected by temperature actually akined to the brownian motion. I really agree with the analogy here since the motion seemed so random when Reas modeled it; it links all back to nature even the randomness.
In the Order of Art, he also talks about making art of your own and I think that is what gives art life: individualism. I really found Mondrian’s evolution in artwork very humane too since we think about life or careers in something very linear or restricted, but seeing how his style emerged along with music in NewYork is a helpful in supporting that we can change paths, decisions, and expression and that is okay.
When Reas explores Computer Graphics, he varies the randomness which changes the art pattern and then shows examples of graphics which vary with different factors. For me, I worked with noise() particularly which brings in slight order in comparison to random(). If we were to talk quantitively, I still would lean into less randomness and more structure since an increased amount of disorder takes away what I want to communicate through artwork. I don’t really think there is an optimum balance as that would keep changing from project to project, here I really resonate with Mondrian’s view of art.