Randomness

Cosmological indeterminacy is perhaps the most difficult form of indeterminacy to apply to 10 PRINT. The rise of the scientific method can be seen as one enduring struggle to impose a more rational view upon the world, abolishing cosmological indeterminacy. From Aristotle to Galileo to Newton, classical mechanics defined the universe as an organized system without random actions. Even Einstein declared that "God does not play dice with the universe." Yet, as a closer examination of randomness on the Commodore 64 will reveal, there is evidence that randomness on the Commodore 64 -- and indeed, on any computer -- is fundamentally "rigged" in a way that echoes Malaby's idea of cosmological indeterminacy. Randomness and chance operations are so necessary to daily life, well beyond the realm of games, that randomness itself must be fixed, repeatable and knowable.

Just as the different categories of indeterminacy in games are often reductively called "chance," so too in the visual arts, music, and other aesthetic practices is the word "chance" used instead of "randomness." In his 1956 chapbook ''Chance Imagery'', the conceptual artist George Brecht described two distinct types of chance operations by which an artist might create a work: "one where the origin of images is unknown because it lies in deeper-than-conscious levels of the mind" and a second "where images derive from mechanical processes not under the artist's control." The first definition describes the work of the surrealists and abstract expressionists who allow subconscious processes to dictate the work. The second definition is closer to the typical concept of randomness in computing; it describes the process of the artists most directly connected to 10 PRINT and its random process. These two senses are worth noting because it difficult to pull on one of the two senses of "chance" without the other one -- the unconscious, in this case -- at least feeling a tug.

The tension between these two chance operations is best captured in an anecdote from William Burroughs about a surrealist rally in the 1920s. Tristan Tzara suggested writing a poem "on the spot by pulling words out of a hat" and, as Burroughs tells it, "a riot ensued" and "wrecked the theater." André Breton, one of the leading surrealists "expelled" Tzara from the group, his purely mechanistic chance operation being an affront to the power and vagaries of the Freudian unconscious. Burroughs goes on to describe a similarly unpredictable mode of composition, the cut-up method, also proposed by Tzara in his 1920 "To Make a Dadaist Poem." Take any poem, Burroughs implores his readers, and cut out each line, and rearrange the slices of the text, and "you will find that it says something and something quite definite" (90). Tzara himself suggests pulling the slices of text blindly from a bag, each random selection becoming the next line of the new poem. The generative possibilities of this cut-up technique resemble the collage in art and the montage in film, and have become far more mainstream than Tzara might have imagined in 1920. Thom Yorke, for instance, wrote the lyrics to "Kid A" in 1999 by pulling fragments of text out of a top hat.

Though Yorke employed this method as a response to severe writer's block, artistic experimentation with randomness in the early part of the 20th century can be seen as a response to the sterile functionality of rationality and empiricism wrought by the Industrial Age, and later, as a deliberate reaction against World War I. Consider Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages (1913-1914). According to his description of the piece, Duchamp dropped three meter-long pieces of string from the height of one meter and let gravity and chance dictate the paths of the twisting string downward. He then glued the twisted string onto canvas, the shape and length of which he preserved in 1918 in wooden cutouts, creating three new "stoppages," parodying the supposed rationality of the meter. When Duchamp described his method in 1914, he observed that the falling thread distorts "itself as it pleases" and the final result becomes "the meter diminished," subverting both the straightness and the length of what commonly goes unquestioned. On his use of randomness, Duchamp said, "Pure chance interested me as a way of going against logical reality." Duchamp, like the other Dada artists with whom he associated, saw "logical reality" as a failure, epitomized by the horrors of World War I. Satire, absurdity, and the embrace of indeterminacy seemed to the Dadaists to be the most reasonable response to Modernity. In the words of the Dada musician Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, "Dada wished to destroy the reasonable frauds of men and recover the natural, unreasonable order. Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today with an illogical nonsense." To Jean (Hans) Arp, a Dada artist, individual authorship was synonymous with authoritarianism and random elements were used to liberate the work.

In music and randomness, the major figure was certainly 20th century composer John Cage. He was strongly influenced by Duchamp. From Cage's point of view, random elements can remove individual bias from creation; they may be used to go beyond the limitations of the taste and bias through "chance operations". In additional to his work as a composer following these ideas, Cage influenced generations of artists through his writing, lectures, and classes. In this text "Experimental Music," Cage wrote, "Those involved with the composition of experimental music find ways and means to remove themselves from the activities of the sounds they make. Some employ chance operations, derived form sources as ancient as the Chinese Books of Changes, or as modern as the tables of random numbers used also by physicists in research" (10). Cage's style of random composition was to create a system of parameters and then leave the results to circumstance. Cage explained, "This means that each performance of such a piece of music is unique, as interesting to its composer as to others listening. It is easy to see again the parallel with nature, for even with leaves of the same tree, no two are exactly alike" (11). Random components are used to transform a single composition into a space of potential compositions. Over the decades, Cage used an array of techniques to insert unexpected elements into this compositions. He defines the range of techniques used by himself and his contemporaries in the 1958 lectures "Composition as Process." There are generally two methods for using random values in music: to define the work at the time of composition or to allow for variation when the work is performed. The most obvious use of randomness in 10 PRINT is in the second category, as random decisions are made during the program's execution, that is, while the BASIC instructions are performed by the Commodore 64.