Your thoughts on randomness
I'm contributing a chapter about randomness, chance, & art to a handbook on computation and art. At this point I'm gathering my thoughts and writing paragraphs on the subject without worrying too much about the chapter's overall structure.
Most recently I was thinking about how using random variables in art does not necessarily mean a random result. The randomness of the result is completely dependent on how the artist structures the use of stochastic stimuli.
In the written thesis for my MFA exhibit I quoted Golan Levin:
It strikes me that there may be a sweet spot in framing how randomness manifests itself in art. If the result is too random, it is just noise. If the randomness is too constrained, it no longer is really an element of the artwork.
I've tried to come up with three simple examples of "too much variety," "not enough variety," and "just right!" The "too much variety" example is an algorithm that creates a grid of squares, each of which has an equal chance to be any one of 16,777,216 different colors. The "too little variety" example fills each square with one of three shades of blue. The "just right" algorithm fills the first square with a random color and then for each following square shifts the color by up to 0.00006% (I think I did my math right in calculating that percent... I take the current RGB hex value and add up to plus-or-minus 5).
I'm wondering, though, if my examples are stacking the deck... is this an intellectually honest analysis? I'm particularly suspicious of my "not enough variety" example. Is there a better algorithm to demonstrate that? See the three images below:
Too much variety
No enough variety
Just right!
Most recently I was thinking about how using random variables in art does not necessarily mean a random result. The randomness of the result is completely dependent on how the artist structures the use of stochastic stimuli.
In the written thesis for my MFA exhibit I quoted Golan Levin:
His flower collages were good, but they were all equally good — and he failed to see that this made them all equally bad as well. It's one thing to endorse the beauty of unexpected outcomes, but we must confront the fact that our algorithms are capable of coldness and ugliness, too, or we will never learn anything.Levin seems to be taking an aesthetic position that real beauty comes from a mixture of ugliness and prettiness. Or perhaps the real objection is that the outcomes aren't all the unexpected; that the algorithm for the flower generation had a narrow range of variety, so as to ensure a consistently beautiful outcome. In effect, the randomness of the flower generation is a bit of a cheat--the artist is using loaded dice.
It strikes me that there may be a sweet spot in framing how randomness manifests itself in art. If the result is too random, it is just noise. If the randomness is too constrained, it no longer is really an element of the artwork.
I've tried to come up with three simple examples of "too much variety," "not enough variety," and "just right!" The "too much variety" example is an algorithm that creates a grid of squares, each of which has an equal chance to be any one of 16,777,216 different colors. The "too little variety" example fills each square with one of three shades of blue. The "just right" algorithm fills the first square with a random color and then for each following square shifts the color by up to 0.00006% (I think I did my math right in calculating that percent... I take the current RGB hex value and add up to plus-or-minus 5).
I'm wondering, though, if my examples are stacking the deck... is this an intellectually honest analysis? I'm particularly suspicious of my "not enough variety" example. Is there a better algorithm to demonstrate that? See the three images below:
Too much variety
No enough variety
Just right!
Labels: generative, random
posted by Ethan at
12:14 PM
4 Comments:
A couple of random thoughts. :)
a. The squares example made me think of the squares the Christopher Alexander used in his book A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets in working to define "order": random black and white squares placed in a line, and then people asked to judge them based on the "order" each sequence had. Alexander was, I recall, looking for degrees of order and the right amount. (I have a copy of the book if you're interested.)
b. Some chaotic systems (in chaos theory) have attractors and "strange attractor" that produces a kind of order out of the chaos---with the individual movement still unpredictable, but the overall movement showing some degree of pattern. This might be related: randomness that nevertheless through other inputs exhibits non-random clusters that intrigue because of their patterns or origins. I recall a sculpture that produced sounds based on the (random) movements of the viewers. The viewers quickly grasped that they were causing the sounds and experimented with different movements. The result was a bunch of viewers hopping and twisting and flailing about, but also coalescing to some degree toward motions that produced pleasant sounds.
Having given it more thought, the problem with my example is the change in method for the just right version. For it to be more legit, the "just right" just simply have medium number of colors and pick them the same way. In a way the just right version is the least random even if it uses more colors than the not random enough version.
Thoughts in no particular order:
1. There is certainly a lot of talk lately about how interestingness happens at the border of "too random" and "not random enough", eg life on the border of order and chaos, and "complexity". There's a Santa Fe Institute for complexity studies? I think they are full of examples of the phenomenon. The soundbite certainly rings true as far as it goes, but unless you are carefully defining randomness and "how much" within a specific domain it runs the risk of being the early 21st-c. answer to the all the cringe-inducingly vague applications of "relativity" and "uncertainty" in the early 20th; "like, everything's relative and uncertain, man". Nonetheless, as with those, there's definitely something to it.
2. I think there are several distinct things we mean by randomness, which are usually conflated. One is "patternlessness". This is the meaning used in cryptography. You could (and people do) painstakingly pick just the "right" next element by a careful process of conscious thought, in order to have the total result be maximally "random" in the sense of "patternless". This sounds paradoxical if you are thinking of another meaning of "random", namely "unpremeditated". This definition depends entirely on your frame of reference -- the actions of other people or other systems may seem random to you, even if they are not random to them. Sometimes "random" simply means "based on input external to the system under consideration".
3. In art, and in the kind of "stochastic" art you're interested in, I wonder if the whole question might not be more usefully framed in terms of *control* rather than randomness. What you're really talking about is the artist yielding control.
In the last example Michael gives of viewers "hopping and twisting and flailing about", there is clearly nothing either patternless or unpremeditated going on -- what you have is some people controlling a system through an unusual interface.
What's similar between that and your colored-square examples is the idea of the artist yielding
control. I think the interesting question is "what kinds of art can we make if instead of the artist controlling everything, some aspects are left open to collaboration either by viewers, by an automated system, or by external inputs?"
In this case it becomes clearer that by "how much randomness" you really mean "what aspects of control should I yield?" In other words "what parts should be designed by the artist, what parts left open?"
It's a little like saying that a good Mad Libs is neither an entirely completed story, nor a sheet of blank paper, but a story with some words replaced by underlines and hints.
The connection with randomness is partly to do with the idea of surprise -- by yielding control, the artist can become surprised by the result of the work.
4. Your squares example does seem somewhat cooked. The purple one is clearly the most beautiful (and check out the vertical lines that form in it -- probably a result of a failure of your algorithm, or your computer's pseudorandom number generator, to be truly patternless?). But it wouldn't be hard to find examples for which either the most or the least "randomness" would be more beautiful.
(For instance, you could start with an image of the Mona Lisa, and have a range of how much you twiddle each pixel. Probably zero twiddling would then yield the most beauty. Similarly, if you have a bag of Chinese characters, or photographs of people, and you are going to pull characters out and place them in a line, having the greatest variety of characters will probably be most interesting, and if they are all the same character or face it will be the least interesting. In all these systems, as well as in your colored square example, the external constraints that bound the experiment are more relevant to the result than the "range of randomness" displayed within it, so in a sense you can't help cooking the books. That doesn't mean the colored squares are a bad *illustration* of an idea which you believe for other reasons, but they don't *prove* anything -- except that it's possible to make good and bad choices about yielding control).
you're right about the one example having a pattern. It's because the one case determines each color based on the previous one. So it's really comparing two patternless algorithms with one that has a built in pattern. Control is interesting. I hadn't thought of it in exactly that term, but I am planning to compare artists who exert editorial control vs those who don't. Choosing the best results is random in the way rolling a die until it comes up as a six is random. But OTOH, perhaps editorial control allows the artist to set up processes that have more varied, less uniformly acceptable results.
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