Looking Outwards 06 – John Legelis

Kenneth Martin‘s Chance and Order series, created in 1971-2,  is a well known piece of art that implements stochastic synthesis in its composition. Though the whole piece is not completely random, the structure of what is on the canvas was determined in a random way. The artist described the process he used to create the process as follows. First, he drew a square grid of lines and labeled the intersections of these lines with unique numbers. Then, he wrote each intersection’s number on a card and drew pairs of cards at random. He then drew a line on the graph connecting the locations of the two drawn points.

I like this piece of art because of how it combines randomness with stylized choice. The line structure is random but the color and repetition of lines is chosen by the artist. As a result this piece is not entirely random but lies somewhere in between.