In his talk, Casey Reas talks about the motivations and thought processes behind his work, particularly his generative art. Although he works with new media, he also references artists like Mondrian and Duchamp; his themes of chance vs. order draw on a history of playing with structure in modern art. Reas is interested in how rigid code, which very much controlled (by a machine and by the artist writing the code), can create something with randomness and irregularities. Moreover, depending on how the piece is constructed, it can take a pleasing form, or remain stable over time, or develop into something extremely chaotic. An interesting aspect is the degree of influence the artist has on the piece, namely controlling the starting conditions, while small elements of randomness determine the complexities. Most of the parts which are under the artist’s “control” are determined ahead of the generated product, while in traditional media, the balance between decisions and real-time chance happen throughout the creation of the piece. With new media, the artist may seem to relinquish a lot of the control over the generation of the image to the machine, but because the “randomness” is fairly constructed, they can control the overall outcome fairly tightly. I’m most interested in the balance between generative and responsive art.