Randomness

Even before the SAGA II playlets, there were other literary experiments with randomness and computers. Noah Wardrip-Fruin identifies the British computer scientist Christopher Strachey as the creator of the first work of electronic literature, a series of "love letters" generated by the Ferranti Mark I computer at Manchester University in 1952 (Wardrip-Fruin 2005). Affectionately known as M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer could produce the evocative love letters at a pace of one per minute for hours on end without duplicating any love letter. The "trick," as Strachey put it, was the two model sentences (e.g. "My ''adjective'' ''noun'' ''adverb'' ''verb'' your ''adjective'' ''noun''" and "You are my ''adjective'' ''noun''") in which the nouns, adjectives, and adverbs were randomly selected from a list of words Strachey had culled from Roget's Thesaurus. Adverbs and adjectives randomly dropped out of the sentence as well, and the computer randomly alternated the two sentences. On the whole, Strachey is dismissive of his foray into the literary use of computers, using the example of the love letters simply to illustrate his point that simple rules can generate diverse and unexpected results (Strachey 1954). Nonetheless, a decade before Raymond Queneau's ''One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems,'' Strachey had unwittingly laid the foundation for the combinatory method of composition, a use of randomness that would grow more central to literature and the arts in the following decades.

Within the first years that computer images were made, random processes were explored thoroughly. The first two exhibitions of computer-generated graphics appeared in art galleries in 1965 and both shows included pieces that were created using random values. In New York, the works of A. Michael Noll and Bela Julesz, both researchers at Bell Labs, were exhibited at the Howard Wise gallery from 6-24 April under the title “Computer-Generated Pictures”. In Stuttgart, the works of Georg Nees and Frieder Nake were exhibited at the Wendelin Niedlich Gallery from 5 - 26 November under the title “Computer-Grafik Programme.”

In 1962, Noll published a technical memorandum at Bell Labs titled “Patterns by 7090”, the number refers to the IBM 7090 digital computer. He explained a series of mathematical and programming techniques that use random values to draw “haphazard patterns” to a Carlson 4020 Microfilm Printer. The eight patterns documented in the memo are the basis for his Guassian Quadratic image, which was exhibited in the 1965 exhibition. Noll used existing subroutines of the printer to draw a sequence of lines to connect a series of x- and y-coordinates that he calculated and stored inside an array. The x-coordinates in the array were generated by a custom subroutine he wrote called WNG (White Noise Generator) which produced random values within the range of its parameters and the y-coordinates were set through a quadratic equation. Through this series of patterns, Noll explored aspects of the important aesthetic aspect of creating a tension between order and disorder, regularity and random values.

Within a given (arbitrarily chosen) image size, a random number of hatchings were generated. Each one of them was determined by the following random variables: location (x, y), size (a, b), orientation of lines within rectangle (horizontal or vertical), number of lines, pen. So for each rectangle there were seven random numbers determining its details.

[More on NAKE's random work]

In 1971, Mohr's work was featured in “Une Esthétique Programmée” at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This exhibition is distinguished as the first solo show of artworks created with a computer to be shown at a museum. Random values were used extensively in the creation of the work, much of it [MORE]

Charles Csuri's ''Random War'' (1967) is another early notable work of computer art to use random values. Like much of Csuri's early computer work and unique in relation to his contemporaries, the work is figurative rather than abstract. This plotter drawing is comprised of outlined military figures patterned off of the little green army men toys popular at the time. Each figure, named after a real person, is placed randomly on the page and given a random status: dead, wounded, or missing. The solders of one army are drawn in red and the other in black; the names and status of each soldier appear at the top of the drawing. In general terms, Csuri's work comments on the often arbitrary nature of war through both its form and content; more specifically, with his reliance on random number generation, Csuri gestures toward the days of computers and random numbers, and their inextricable link to the Cold War.

Today, within the traditional visual arts, the most widely known artists that utilize random values still do so without computers. For example, 2002 Turner Prize winner Keith Tyson has designed sculptures entirely through rolling dice. Certainly, one reason for this reluctance to use computers is the stigma surrounding its use in art. Manfred Mohr, an pioneer of computer-generated art remarked in an interview, "I called my work generative art, or occasionally also algorithmic works. The problem was that no-one understood either of these terms, and I was forced -- so to speak -- to declare my drawings as art from the computer... people accused me of degrading art, because I was employing capitalistic instruments of war -- computer was a word non grata!".[ddaa p. 35] While Mohr was referring to the 1970s, the aversion to computers remains strong today within contemporary art.

Within the last decade, however, as a new generation of visual artists have started to program their work, computed random numbers have played an increased role in the visual landscape. The most prominent programming languages used by visual artists have functions for generating random numbers, noise values, and setting the random seed value to repeat a sequence. [More?]

With the perspective of time, it seems that aesthetic computational work and random values are intertwined. Writing in 1970, Noll highlights randomness as an essential feature of the computer in relation to the arts, “The computer is a unique device for the arts since it can function solely as an obedient tool with vast capabilities for controlling complicated and involved processes, but than again, full exploitation of its unique talents for controlled randomness and detailed algorithms could result in an entirely new medium – a creative artistic medium.”