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 producing a duplicate. 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 29-30). Nonetheless, a decade before Raymond Queneau's landmark combinatory work ''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.

The 1960s were a time for radical experimentation with randomness in the visual arts. Even though computers were available at that point for the exploration of chance operations, they were used in a very limited way because of problems of access to the machines and a general distrust of computer technology within the arts. The 10 PRINT program is remarkable because it was created later, when these barriers to the use of computers in the visual arts were greatly reduced. The C64 was relatively inexpensive and accessible. Furthermore, the public image of the computer was changing from a machine that supported technocracies to a tool for self-empowerment and creativity.

Before personal computers, calculating machines could only be found in universities and research labs and because of the cost and perceived use. They were typically used exclusively for serious work, not for creating aesthetic images. When artists did gain access to these machines it was typically through artists-in-residence programs at companies such as Bell Labs and IBM, and through infrastructure such as Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) based in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art and Technology initiative in Los Angeles. Many of the first aesthetic computer graphics were made not by artists, but by mathematicians and engineers who were curious about the potential for other uses for the machines at their labs.