-09.08.2024-
This reflection was written on Eyeo2012 - Casey Reas
By all means, what does 'generative' stand for? And what about 'random', 'chaos', 'definitive', 'rules', 'control', 'freedom', 'certainty', and so on?
Before getting into details in Reas' presentation, these questions occupied my mind. I would say that this week's production had already raised these questions for me, and Reas' philosophy presented exactly resonates with them. Binary systems could be potentially hazardous in terms of oversimplification from time to time, while they are very much a preferable tool for us humans to reference the world and reality. That happens to the balance between art and artist (as I touched on a bit in the first week's production), the balance between randomness and certainty, the balance between aesthetics and technicalities (I encountered as many roles like a guitarist, a mixing engineer, a calligrapher, and here as a coder-artist), etc.
One of the observations I made out of the examples is the human physicality in that Mondrian painting where presented is the well-known seeming (or actually, as intended) abstraction of objectiveness. It is very interesting to learn that boogie-woogie music played as an inspiration to it as a musician. However, the great representation of something objective merged exactly from the human strokes of incapability to reach definite control. In that paintng, the refined thoughts and emotions - are spiritual of the mind - instead of spiritual of the body. On the other hand, the common lack of spiritual physicality these days may encourage us to also gaze through the opposite perspective and harness that to-be-decided set of definitiveness to praise the chance in our physicalities. In simpler words (or actually, in this specific context), the rules of computation and programming are grounds for the flourishing randomness in arts or, in other words, the physicality we humans could imagine, appreciate, adapt to, and reiterate we could potentially pursue.
This can be seen in many other examples in the presentation. From the deconstruction and reconstruction of figurative, symbolic, representative fragments or captures of the architecture following definitive rules to music from the Book of Change, chances on the rules and rules on the chances intersect with each other. In fact, the much amusing and providential discovery I found there is the irony of Book of Change in this particular context. While being named the Book of Change (Yi Jing 易经), this 'book' is many times accused of superstition but essentially represents the ancient wisdom of finding patterns, trends, and rules of the world to make predictions and guide life. That being said, the juxtaposition of chance and rule has been, in a sense, ubiquitous ever since.
Chance that is always planned and always surprising.
I believe this quote earlier said by Raes goes perfectly with the latest examples demonstrated in the presentation. While we recognize the power of randomness in certainties and the certainties in randomness, to what extent it is random/certain may stretch our attention further - as my opening wonderings suggest, and the question 'where is the optimum balance between total randomness and complete control?' lies in this middle ground. That being said, there is no way to maneuver around the definition of randomness and control - or at least while maneuvering, the multiplicity of them should be adopted. For example, the increment of randomness was realized by introducing more 'randomizeable parameters' in their second-to-last current project. Regarding merely the result, the randomness was raised for sure to human perception; However, this result was achieved by adding more control (or more controllable codes) to the program. In this case, I would rather perceive this 'conflict' as a mutual succession from both sides - when our technical attempts grant ideological and artistic fruits.
To end this reflection, I'd like to leave a question on 'randomness in isolation.' To my current understanding, there is no such thing as isolation in this field of mutual interaction - whether which side we picked at the beginning. Eventually, they merge and serve under a broader intention, purpose, collective, etc., and this will probably become one of my rules of thumb in the future.
So, on top of that, isolation could stand where?
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