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 art, random
posted by Ethan at
12:14 PM
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