Casey Reas’ talk about Chance Operation really brought into light the possibilities chaos and order can create. As I was looking through the art pieces he created, I had a hard time thinking about how he coded such a design. They were messy, but in an orderly way, and it really made me focus on the piece. One of the concepts he mentioned was the use of “jittering” to create an organic movement and that was very intriguing because a small movement of particles created so many different pieces that looked nothing alike. For me, it’s exactly this randomness that makes it hard for me to think of the code he used to make the piece.
When Reas’ started talking some of the art pieces that actually represented the artist’s current time, I was surprised because I never knew there was a connect between the art and current history (e.g. World War I art pieces). I’ve never really understood art museums and there are many times where I’m in museums thinking “how did they get famous from this piece? I could make that, too.” However, since watching this video, I’ve realized that it’s what the art represents / the meaning behind the art that’s made it less simple than it seems.
After watching this, I’m more excited about experimenting with randomness and getting more comfortable with understanding how it works. I want to get to a point where I can understand how some of the small changes in noise() or random() can change up my piece (e.g. frequency, sin(), cos(), rotate()).