Visual Artist Casey Reas has spent the
past decade exploring the relationship of chaos and order in systems. Early in
his presentation Reas mentions his gravitation towards artificial intelligence
and the phenomenon of emergence. In an effort to pull organic form from the synthetic,
Reas tugs at the factors of disorder to yield a surprisingly complex work of
art from the simple-ordered assembly of his creations. With his various processing
works implementing strings of text as code, he has created diverse works
of art by introducing the key chaos ingredient he refers to as “noise.” By
integrating a small amount of noise (chance/chaos) with “a lot of decision
making” (design/order), the programs he composes, even the simple one-liners,
come to life and bloom before our eyes. It is this element of chaos that spurs
the evolution of the resulting highly-structured and systematic artworks. The composition
I connected with most is his “Yes No” prints from 2012, which he later modified
and applied as the cover to the collaboratively written book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
(Software Studies). In this study Reas again utilizes arbitrary elements in
his code to produce a highly patterned, maze-like motif. What I initially found
rather fascinating is that Reas used a Commodore 64, a cutting edge
tool in its prime but now a relic of early computing, to produce these beautifully
perplexing images. Not only was the resulting pattern mesmerizing to watch
unfold, it also reminded me of the typography explorations we’ve been doing in
Graphic Design class. This discovery in turn made me think of a creative practice
my professor mentioned in class: the random placement of text within a
composition. She contended that we are often pleasantly surprised by what
random chance can offer us in the creative world. However, she conceded that the
method doesn’t always work; we just have to try it out and see what happens. I
found it amusing that Reas compared himself to Chance as an artist, and how he regularly
found Chance to be superior. This statement made me wonder about the intangible
human element in art, and that perhaps it isn’t so abstract after all—that we
are, simply put, the chaotic constituent in our otherwise measured pursuit of
art.