Week 3: Reading Response: "10 Print", Randomness, by Nick Montfort et al. - kalibirdsall/Creative-Coding-Class-Wiki GitHub Wiki

Randomness is in every part of our lives, beginning at conception and ending at death. Despite our best efforts to deny and counter it, randomness frames and defines our lives. As the author writes “Randomness and chance operations are so necessary to daily life, well beyond the realm of games, that randomness itself is framed as fixed, repeatable, and knowable.” (p.124).

It was really interesting to think about randomness in all the different fields and corners of human history outlined by this text, from art and music to the cold war, computing and statistics.

In art, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists embraced different forms of randomness. Some "sought to allow subconscious processes to dictate their work", others used it to generate randomness through "mechanical operations" such as pulling words out of a hat. The first artists to get access to computers in the 1960s quickly explored the theme and method of randomness to create work with computer programs. Musicians such as John Cage saw randomness as fundamental to their work, stating that "It is easy to see again the parallel with nature, for even with leaves of the same tree, no two are exactly alike”.

My favorite thing in this article was the image of the book of "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" created by the Rand Project. I understand the great need for random numbers in science and statistics, but still, it just kind of struck me that humans decided to make a book with nothing in it other than a million random numbers.

It's also interesting to think about how computer scientists, needing randomly generated numbers for statistical purposes, turned to the next best thing, "pseudorandom" numbers to run their models!

Another fun example of humans playing with the concept of randomness is the love letter computer program made by Christopher Strachey. Of all the types of text he could have generated, he chose love letters. I wonder if he had feelings about how random love is, or if he just chose that theme of love letters randomly!

Considering the role of randomness in art, science and our lives forces us to work against our brain's default to seek patterns, purpose and cause in everything around us, and it forces us to see the fundamental random nature of the systems around us.