Aleatoricism is the creation of
artArt is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings...
by chance, exploiting the principle of
randomnessRandomness is a concept with somewhat disparate meanings in several fields. It also has common meanings which may have loose connections with some of those more definite meanings...
. The word derives from the Latin word
alea, the rolling of
diceA die or dice is a small polyhedral object, usually cubic, used for generating random numbers or other symbols...
. It should not be confused with either
improvisationImprovisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...
or indeterminacy.
An example of aleatory writing is the
automatic writingAutomatic writing is the process or production of writing material that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer. Practitioners say that the writer's hand forms the message, with the person being unaware of what will be written....
of the French Surrealists involving
dreamDreams are a succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is known as...
s, et cetera. The French literary group
OulipoOulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
for example saw no merit in aleatory work and its members altogether eliminated chance and randomness from their writing, substituting potentiality as in
Raymond QueneauRaymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:...
's
Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion PoemsRaymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One hundred million million poems , published in 1961, is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book...
).
Luke RhinehartLuke Rhinehart is the pen name of the author George Cockcroft. Luke Rhinehart is also a character in some of Cockcroft's books. In this article "George Cockcroft" refers to the author, while "Luke Rhinehart" refers to the character.- The books :...
's novel
The Dice ManThe Dice Man is a semi-comedic novel published in 1971 by George Cockcroft under the pen name Luke Rhinehart and tells the story of a psychiatrist who begins making life decisions based on the casting of dice. Cockcroft wrote the book based on his own experiences of using dice to make decisions...
tells the story of a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who, feeling bored and unfulfilled in life, starts making decisions about what to do based on a roll of a die..
Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his book
The Virtual Muse.
Aleatoric methods have been used in artistic composition for thousands of years, and were popularized in the early 20th century by the
DadaDada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
movement.
Using chance in artisic composition is making a remarkable impact in the 21st Century as artists discover the potential of aleatoric principles combined with new technology.
Aleatoricism is the creation of
artArt is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings...
by chance, exploiting the principle of
randomnessRandomness is a concept with somewhat disparate meanings in several fields. It also has common meanings which may have loose connections with some of those more definite meanings...
. The word derives from the Latin word
alea, the rolling of
diceA die or dice is a small polyhedral object, usually cubic, used for generating random numbers or other symbols...
. It should not be confused with either
improvisationImprovisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...
or indeterminacy.
Literature
An example of aleatory writing is the
automatic writingAutomatic writing is the process or production of writing material that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer. Practitioners say that the writer's hand forms the message, with the person being unaware of what will be written....
of the French Surrealists involving
dreamDreams are a succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is known as...
s, et cetera. The French literary group
OulipoOulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
for example saw no merit in aleatory work and its members altogether eliminated chance and randomness from their writing, substituting potentiality as in
Raymond QueneauRaymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:...
's
Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion PoemsRaymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One hundred million million poems , published in 1961, is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book...
).
Luke RhinehartLuke Rhinehart is the pen name of the author George Cockcroft. Luke Rhinehart is also a character in some of Cockcroft's books. In this article "George Cockcroft" refers to the author, while "Luke Rhinehart" refers to the character.- The books :...
's novel
The Dice ManThe Dice Man is a semi-comedic novel published in 1971 by George Cockcroft under the pen name Luke Rhinehart and tells the story of a psychiatrist who begins making life decisions based on the casting of dice. Cockcroft wrote the book based on his own experiences of using dice to make decisions...
tells the story of a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who, feeling bored and unfulfilled in life, starts making decisions about what to do based on a roll of a die..
Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his book
The Virtual Muse.
Art
Aleatoric methods have been used in artistic composition for thousands of years, and were popularized in the early 20th century by the
DadaDada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
movement.
Using chance in artisic composition is making a remarkable impact in the 21st Century as artists discover the potential of aleatoric principles combined with new technology. Digital cameras, Photoshop, and computer generated random art programs along with wildly improvisational use of cutting edge materials and equipment have opened up a new world of possibilities for today's art students and emerging artists. A small group of international artists have formed a group called
MAMA, or the Movement of Aleatoric Modern Artists, a worldwide collaboration of chance based artists who promote the principles and techniques of aleatoric methods in the execution of contemporary art in modern times.
Andrej Bauer invented the "Random Art" program (1998) which has been generating aleatoric art works since it's inception. The artist is actually a computer program, which generates artworks complete with titles entirely by itself, and every day new pictures are presented. One of the newest applications of this approach is a
Dynamic PaintingDynamic painting is a movement in visual arts where paintings are updated on an on-going basis. The artist determines the general principles for image genesis and develops algorithms for transformation methods...
by
San BaseSan Base is a contemporary Canadian artist, born Dec 01 1956 in Russia.He graduated from school of Fine Arts in 1974, and received his PhD in Cybernetics from the Technical University in 1979.-Life and Work:...
.
Music
The term
aleatoric musicAleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer...
was first coined by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955 to describe a course of sound events that is "determined in general but depends on chance in detail".
Pierre BoulezPierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music and conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
applied the term in this sense to his own pieces to distinguish them from the indeterminate music of
John CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war...
, though both are often described as aleatory. While Boulez purposefully composed his pieces to allow the performer certain liberties with regard to the sequencing and repetition of parts, Cage often composed through the application of chance operations without allowing the performer liberties. Another prolific aleatory music composer is
Karlheinz StockhausenKarlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries...
. Qubais Reed Ghazala, founder of the circuit-bending chance-music movement, is an important contemporary chance artist also pioneering aleatoric work in visual media (original techniques in suminagashi, dye migration, aperture shift photography).
Film
In film-making, there are several avant-garde examples; Andy Voda's "Chance Chants" (1979) was created completely using various chance operations (coin flip, choosing words out of a hat, a recorded "telephone game", the vagaries of tracing over drawings) in the decision-making for each creative choice. It was a three part film, the first part being a hand-made computer film, the second a visualization of Allison Knowles'
http://www.aknowles.com computer poem "House of Dust", and the third a visualization of evolution through a children's telephone game.
Fred Camper's
SN (1984, first screening 2002) uses coin-flipping to determine which three of 18 possible reels to screen and what order they should go in (4896 permutations).
Barry Salt, now better known as a film scholar, is known to have made a film,
Permutations, six reels long which takes the word aleatory quite literally by including a customized die for the projectionist to roll to determine the reel order (720 permutations).
Grant Patten utilizes an
I ChingThe I Ching , “Yì Jīng” , Classic of Changes or Book of Changes; also called Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. The book contains a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system...
-inspired aleatory method to predict the date of his death in his short animation
"The (Rough) Date of My Death" (2007).