Regularity

This repetitive process of minimalist marks to create a large pattern seems less like an effort to make the programmer feel the god-like power of the fine artist but rather the plodding repetition of the machine. Yet that single line of instructions proves to be, as this book demonstrates, deceptively simple, building as it repeats the evocation of an unending generation of mazes, linking it to two artistic traditions. The first is the world of craft, particularly pattern-based crafts such as needlework and ornamental design. The second is a movement within the fine arts in the twentieth century to create complex patterns out of repeated procedures upon very basic units. In this way, the aesthetic of 10 PRINT parallels experiments in painting, sculpture, sound composition, video art, performance, experimental animation, and dance, particularly from the decade immediately prior to 10 PRNT. In both cases, the art forms rely on lessons conveyed in 10 PRINT, a continual repetition of a simple rhythmic procedure or rule across a regular space or time signature can create a complex and stimulating gestalt. What fine arts deploy as an act in radical minimalism and craft deploys as a established technique for production, the C64 presents as a glimpse at the potential and the unexpected ramifications of the simple repeated rule.

This repetitive process of minimalist marks to create a large pattern seems less like an effort to make the programmer feel the god-like power of the fine artist but rather the plodding repetition of the machine. Yet that single line of instructions proves to be, as this book demonstrates, deceptively simple, building as it repeats the evocation of an unending generation of mazes, linking it to two artistic traditions. The first is the world of craft, particularly pattern-based crafts such as needlework and ornamental design. The second is a movement within the fine arts in the twentieth century to create complex patterns out of repeated procedures upon very basic units. In this way, the aesthetic of 10 PRINT parallels experiments in painting, sculpture, sound composition, video art, performance, experimental animation, and dance, particularly from the decade immediately prior to 10 PRNT. In both cases, the art forms rely on lessons conveyed in 10 PRINT, a continual repetition of a simple rhythmic procedure or rule across a regular space or time signature can create a complex and stimulating gestalt. What fine arts deploy as an act in radical minimalism and craft deploys as a established technique for production, the C64 presents as a glimpse at the potential and the unexpected ramifications of the simple repeated rule.

In his classic yet provocative text, E.H. Gombrich wrestles with the tensions between repetition and redundancy that can lead to either stimulation or boredom. As he reflects on pavement designs he notes the pleasure in the encountering the pavement whose pattern one cannot fully grasp. Gombrich explains this desire for new information through information theory emerging at the time, where information increases in tandem with unpredictability (9). He goes on to speculate that the viewer examines patterns by trying to anticipate what comes next. “Delight,” he writes, “lies somewhere between boredom and confusion” (9). 10 PRINT no doubt offers similar delights, resulting from its creation of a complex pattern from a simple random alternation. As Gombrich later argues, the greatest novelty computers bring to visual design and variation is not only its ability “to follow any complex rule of organization but also to introduce an exactly calculated dose of randomness” (94). Computers then become entrancing pattern weavers.

In his classic yet provocative text, E.H. Gombrich wrestles with the tensions between repetition and redundancy that can lead to either stimulation or boredom. As he reflects on pavement designs he notes the pleasure in the encountering the pavement whose pattern one cannot fully grasp. Gombrich explains this desire for new information through information theory emerging at the time, where information increases in tandem with unpredictability (9). He goes on to speculate that the viewer examines patterns by trying to anticipate what comes next. “Delight,” he writes, “lies somewhere between boredom and confusion” (9). 10 PRINT no doubt offers similar delights, resulting from its creation of a complex pattern from a simple random alternation. As Gombrich later argues, the greatest novelty computers bring to visual design and variation is not only its ability “to follow any complex rule of organization but also to introduce an exactly calculated dose of randomness” (94). Computers then become entrancing pattern weavers.