alchan-Looking Outwards 06

John Pound’s Ran Dum LOOP (1999) is a collection of code that randomly generates comic- and cartoon-style art. (An example of one of the randomly-generated pieces is shown below).

Pound wrote the code entirely in PostScript. The program does have some elements that are not randomly determined, but I wasn’t able to find out what those were or what type of randomness Pound was using.

I chose this project because I was drawn to the idea of randomly generating something that doesn’t seem like it would work well as a randomly generated piece. The viewer has to try to make sense of the generated panels and images, and I like the idea of being able to “see” an overarching narrative in a random sequence of images.