Author: Yiyang Xu

In the video, Casey Reas starts with the age-old tension between order and chaos. He explains, “chaos is what existed before creation, and order is brought about by god or gods into the world.” For centuries, creation was a divine act of imposing regularity on a chaotic world. As humans ourselves, we sought to illuminate our “godness” through patterns and symmetry.

On the contrary, the early 20th-century Dadaists inverted this relationship. Against a “new” world era confined by scientific laws and societal logic (which had potentially led to the chaos of war), they embraced chance as fundamentally human to take apart what they saw as “the reasonable frauds of men.” The entire focal point of their “chance operations” is to set up the artwork where chance creates beauty in chaos. Artists like Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp used chance operations not to create chaos, but to rebel against a rigid order they no longer trusted and escape the confines of their own preconceptions, creating something truly unexpected.

Whereas this embrace of randomness, or unexpectation to the human eyes, is not a complete surrender to chaos. The rules–much like the physical laws of the nature–are secretly flowing under. As Reas’s own work demonstrates, his generative systems show that a small amount of “noise” is essential to prevent a static homogeneity. More importantly, why do the simple, inorganic rules create such sophisticated spectacle? I explored the dynamic, emergent complexity–the assembly of the crowd–in the course Robota Psyche.

My presentation, “Power of the Mass”, discussed how simple, inorganic rules governing a crowd can produce an incredibly sophisticated and life-like spectacle. The boundary of rules allows for randomness, but it is the assembly of the crowd that breathes life into the system. It raises the question of whether true creativity lies not in meticulous control, but in designing elegant systems that balance intention with unpredictability.

I would like to end my reflection with a Gerhard Richter quote.

“Above all, it’s never a blind chance, it’s a chance that is always planned but also always surprising and I needed in order to carry on in order to eradicate my mistakes to destroy what I’ve worked out wrong to introduce something different and disruptive I’m often astonished to find how much better chances than I am.”

My idea was to create a portrait that represents growth, experience, and the things that shape us. Instead of a face, I wanted to make my self-portrait a fluid, continuous scene, through which we see the diorama of a life being lived.

• The Tree: Me. It starts as nothing and grows over time, with its branches reaching out in unique, unpredictable directions. Its placement on the field is random, symbolizing the random circumstances we’re all born into.
• Yellow Lights: These are the fleeting, positive moments. They could be ideas, bursts of inspiration, happy memories, or moments of creativity. They fall gently, glow for a while, and then fade away, leaving a subtle impression but more deeply, imprints on the tree leaves that catch them.
• Grey Stones: These represent the heavier, more permanent things in life. They could be foundational beliefs, significant life lessons, or more often than not, burdens and responsibilities. They fall with more weight, and once they hit the ground, they settle and become part of the landscape permanently. A sufficient number of stones would pave a road through the screen, from left to right.

The entire process is automated. I press play, and the code “paints” the portrait for a set amount of time before freezing, leaving a final, static image that is unique every time it’s run.

The choice of background was a key point of hesitation during the creative process. I first tried a pure black canvas, but the branches and their few leaves seemed too sparse and lonely. My next step was a semi-transparent black background, which created lovely trails but didn’t feel quite right visually. I finally settled on a semi-transparent dark grey, as it softened the high contrast while preserving the beautiful “ghosting” effect.

Below is the first version of the background.

One of my favorite tiny inventions for this project was a simple interactive feature that lets you control the flow of time: By simply holding down the mouse button, the entire animation slows to a crawl, creating a quiet but reflective moment on the scene as it unfolds. It doesn’t alter the final portrait, but it changes how you experience its creation.

// Mouse press animation, simple but I found quite effective
if (mouseIsPressed === true) {
  frameRate(10); // Slow down the animation
} else {
  frameRate(60); // Resume normal speed
}