[eu-gene] Re: Re: Generative or not?

[n++k]

Random() is to the generative art creator what Photoshop's lens-flare 
is to the computer graphician.

Or something like that. At least I've noticed it in my own work.

But I rather like your description of randomization has a way of 
staying silent. Sometimes silence
is deafening.

Used as a base, randomization is the perfect masochist's tool. A way to 
deny one's own identity and
responsability. A refusal to trust one's own judgements.

In this fashion, it is also a productivity tool, as it enables not to 
spend too much time on getting
things just right.

Used in smaller amounts, it appears as a color, filling the voids so to 
say. Not entirely useful, not really
necessary, but akin to filling the background with a texture difficult 
to discern.

Its use may hold many meanings. So many that discussing its meaning 
requires to specify the exact
context and extent of its use.

On jeudi, mai 11, 2006, at 08:26 Europe/Paris, Paul Harrison wrote:

> On 5/11/06, Jim Andrews <jim at vispo.com> wrote:
> ...
>> It seems to me that randomization usually provides minor variation. 
>> Not to
>> say unimportant variation. But minor in the sense that the major 
>> variations
>> in a work do not come so much from randomization as structural 
>> design. You
>> might use randomization to choose among several fundamental structural
>> designs, but it isn't the choice that enables the variation here so 
>> much as
>> the existence of the several fundmental structures. So that, in this 
>> case,
>> one wonders sometimes whether to cycle through them or to select 
>> among them
>> randomly.
>>
>
> Nod. Randomization just gives you a way of exploring some space of
> potential outputs. There are always systematic ways of doing such an
> exploration too. A possible difference is that if you are noticably
> systematic, that can be a statement in itself, perhaps a statement
> that you don't want to make. So randomization lets you stay silent on
> some things.
>
> Sometimes randomness does produce major variations. Systems that
> create random programs sometimes do this, for example (or random
> cellular automata or tiling pieces... anything capable of simulating a
> Turing machine). If there was a variation produced of unusual merit,
> and that the author hadn't anticipated, one might be uneasy assigning
> credit for its creation to that author. But a systematic exploration
> is just as likely to turn these up.
>
> -- 
> Dr. Paul Harrison
>
> http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/
> pfh at logarithmic.net
> jabber pfh at jabber.org.au
> icq 298231643
>
> -- 
> 'randomnumber = lastrandomnumber * 6364136223846793005 + 1'
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