LookingOutwards-06 – Page 6 – [OLD FALL 2020] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

LO 6 – Randomness

Kenneth Martin was an English artist who mainly created non-representational/abstract art using geometric shapes. Martin drew inspiration from the work of Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Calder, interested in exploring spatial relationships between simple structural elements.

“Chance and Order” (1971) is one of my favorite pieces by Martin, and I think that his process of creating this artwork is quite fascinating. Randomness played a significant role in producing the final work, yet his approach was very organized and systematic, hence the name “Chance and Order” which describes his process and method. I found the following explanation regarding his process for the “Chance and Order” series of work: “The points of intersection on a grid of squares are numbered and the numbers are written on small cards and picked at random…A line is made between each successive pair of numbers as they are picked out” (Understanding Uncertainty).

I admire the simplicity of Martin’s work and find that while his pieces only utilize basic graphic/geometric elements, they are still very visually intriguing.

Chance, Order, Change 6 (Black) 1978-9
More about Martin’s process

Looking Outwards : 06

Perlin noise was created by Ken Perlin in 1983 for a film he was working on, Tron. 35 years ago, Ken Perlin won an academic award for discovering the technique now called “Perlin Noise.” Perlin noise is described as a type of gradient noise that interpolates random values to create smooth transitions through the noise function. It helped him add randomness to CG renderings of natural elements like smoke, fire, and water. Its flexibility in mathematical expressions allowed perlin noise to be used to create a wide variety of textures that imitate the controlled random appearance of textures in nature.

In our architecture studio under Dana Cupkova, we are exploring randomness using keyshotand other rendering tools such as grasshopper and kangaroo and it was extremely interesting to read about a similar concept but in a different perspective altogether. I was extremely inspired by how random yet sophisticated his textures look and surprised that something computer generated could still have that level of detail. In real life we take textures like this for granted and do not realise the amount of work that goes into creating smooth transitions.

LO Randomness

The randomness artist I will be talking about is Merce Cunningham. Merce Cunningham was a 20th century choreographer who devised his pieces through chance alone. Some of his techniques included prescibing numbers on a die to certain dance moves and created sequences by rolling the die an amount of times. He also often would teach his dances without any music, to allow that to be a random variable separate from the performers’ abilities to do the dance. The dancers would only hear the music for the first time on the day of the performance. Merce Cunningham was wild, I loved how his work centered making dance accessible for all. I see his techniques of chance and randomness as avenues for anyone to choreograph, which I admire greatly. As you can see in the piece that I am linking, “Beach Birds for Camera,” from 1993, the way he devised his pieces allowed for asynchronous and repeated movement from the performers, contributing to his unusual but distinctive style.

LO-06: Randomness

The project I chose to focus on this week is Tim Knowles’ Civita 24 hour Balloon Drawing. I admire this artwork because of its uniqueness. Knowles’ method of incorporating randomness made his final piece very unconventional but also very simple. To make his drawing, Knowles attached a pen to a helium balloon whose motions were “randomly” generated by the wind movements during the day which drew on a 24 meter long slowly moving paper throughout the day. Although wind movements are not completely random, there was a lot of variability in his final 24-meter long drawing which highlighted the balloon’s “random” movements. Knowles’ artistic sensibilities are manifested in the final piece since, like many of his other artworks, he incorporates nature as an art tool to produce very simple but unique pieces.

Civita 24 Hour Balloon Drawing (Tim Knowles, 2001)

Looking Outwards 06: Randomness

“Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance” is an abstract piece of artwork created by Ellsworth Kelly. Rather than the focus on a particular style or personal artistic preferences, his artwork hones in on randomization and chance. This particular piece consists of eight collages plastered with hundreds of colored squares. Through the use of a mathematical system, colored paper slips were randomly numbered. These numbers correlated to eighteen different color hues that were then put on the canvas grid. Squares were placed on the collage in a systematic manner, removing himself and his judgement from the process.

Ellsworth Kelly, *Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance*, 1951-1953

Kelly’s artistic sensibilities manifest in this piece with his experimentation and belief that any color could go with any other color. Inspired by expressive artistic freedom, Kelly used a unique approach for each collage of squares by working with one color at a time. This particular piece is interesting to me because it seems like the collage of colored squares are strategic, but it was created purely off of randomization.

Looking Outwards 06: Randomness

William Latham is a computer scientist who creates fractal art using the Mutator program. Fractal art is achieved through the mathematical calculations of fractal objects displayed, with the use of self-similar transforms that are generated and manipulated with different assigned geometric properties to produce multiple variations of the shape in never ending patterns. Since it can infinitely produce the patterns, the artist doesn’t know what the artwork is going to look like at the end. One of his projects that grabbed my interest is called the White Horn and was produced at IBM in 1990. This artwork is supposed to represent the reminiscent of squid and marine life. What I admire about Latham is that he creates 3D fractal art works unlike other fractal artists who work with flat surfaces. It was refreshing to see these types of artworks in the form of 3D sculptures. In addition, he spent a lot of his time in the natural history museum, taking inspiration from the natural patterns and forms. I thought it was interesting that he artistically combined the natural world with the digital world to create his own humanized version of the natural system.

LO: Randomness

Tyler Hobbs is an artist who acknowledges that randomness and spontaneity play a role in great works. I admire that this artist believes studying/experimenting/controlling randomness is useful for artistic purposes. In this “Continuity No. 8” art piece, I was able to see his attempt to explain his thoughts on one aspect of randomness here. His “Continuity series begins by generating semi-random quadrilaterals.” The overlapping intersections of the quadrilaterals become the negative space(black-colored area). The proximity to a randomly chosen focal point draws the brightness, transparency, sharpness, and other aspects of the positive space. The combined contents of the first layer takes a role in the generation of the next layer and created a harmonious art piece at the end.

LO – 5

Manfred Mohr’s “space.color.motion” initially written in 1999 is an example of computational art that uses simple design elements like lines, color fill, and eventually, animation, to convey a sense of dimensionality that is both convincing and transcendent of reality– “unimaginable constellations,” to quote Mohr. The 6-d hypercube and its angles and increments are based on the present time and date but are otherwise randomly generated with every restart of the program, creating animations that are unique with every passing frame. Although these aspects are randomly generated, there is a system of diagonals that are diametrically opposite of each other, as well as one determining the thickness of lines and how it constructs planar quadrilaterals– these are controlled by the established algorithm, systematizing randomness to create an intentional and mesmerizing work of art.

The many applications of this project demonstrate an aspect of computational art that traditional art is unable to achieve. Because of its randomly generated nature, many stills of the animation can be captured and made into collections of artwork. Mohr also exhibited this project in various galleries and public spaces in the form of animation and paintings, inspiring a myriad of different experiences with one computer program.

Mueller-Roth Gallery at Art Cologne 2003

Sony Center Berlin, June / July / August 2004

Looking Outwards 06: Randomness

Linyi Dai was an architecture student at RISD in 2015. Their piece, which was featured in Fast Company’s article “The Value of Randomness in Art and Design” uses architectural rendering and I admire how they manipulated the random function to create a 3-dimensional shape. I think the way artists can use computers to make shapes is really cool, especially 3-D ones. Dai restricted the random values to a certain parameter and used the value of each register over 50 steps to generate the rungs of a sphere. Dai is an architect and I think this piece demonstrates the ability to render 3-D shapes in a way that is necessary for their field.

Looking Outwards – 06

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, by Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena, was a project created in 2001 to represent stock market trades live. The biggest draw to this project for me was that it was two artists’ representation of the stock market, and I had just got into trading this past summer myself. On their website they describe components of the stock market as creatures that have unique “DNA” code and each traded company represents a star. The positions of these companies started out randomly positioned, but eventually drifted together over time into clusters, constellations, and nebulae. When a star is flashing it means someone just sold or bought a trade, and these trades produce food for the creatures in the “environment” the artists created. The bigger the trade, the more food is produced. The title was based on the “Black Scholes” formula which was attempting to accurately estimate the current value of a share. Two of the three mathematicians, who by the way won (all three) a Nobel Prize for this formula, went on to start a company called, “Long Term Capital Management”. Moral of this story is the company ended chaotically which almost brought the US stock market down. There are many parallels between biology, history, and the stock market that truly make this a unique and inspirational piece. I am not doing it a justice with this short blog, so I would definitely recommend checking out their website (posted below) describing the piece.

http://www.blackshoals.net/the-project-1