aleatory

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Aleatoricism is the creation of art by chance, exploiting the principle of randomness.^{[citation needed]} The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice. It should not be confused with either improvisation or indeterminacy.^[1]

Literature

An example of aleatory writing is the automatic writing of the French Surrealists involving dreams, et cetera. The French literary group Oulipo for example saw no merit in aleatory work and its members altogether eliminated chance and randomness from their writing, substituting potentiality as in Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems).^{[citation needed][clarification needed]}

Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man 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.^{[citation needed]}.^[2]

Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his book The Virtual Muse.^[3]

Art

Aleatoric methods have been used in artistic composition for thousands of years, and were popularized in the early 20th century by the Dada movement.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} 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 its 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 Painting by San Base.^{[citation needed]}

Music

The term aleatoric music 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".^[4] Pierre Boulez applied the term in this sense to his own pieces to distinguish them from the indeterminate music of John Cage,^[5] though both are often described as aleatory.^{[citation needed]} 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 Stockhausen.^[6] 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).^{[citation needed]}

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'[1] 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)^[7] 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).^[8]

Grant Patten utilizes an I Ching-inspired aleatory method to predict the date of his death in his short animation "The (Rough) Date of My Death" (2007).

References

1. ^ Sabine Feisst, "Losing Control: Indeterminacy and Improvisation in Music Since 1950", New Music Box (1 March 2002): § "Aleatory—Pierre Boulez".
2. ^ Rhinehart, Luke (1971), The Dice Man, ISBN 0900735007 
3. ^ Hartman, Charles (1996), The Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0819522392  (see especially pp. 54–64.)
4. ^ Werner Meyer-Eppler. 1957. "Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound", translated by Alexander Goehr, Die Reihe 1 ("Electronic Music", 1957): 55–61; original German edition, 1955, as "Statistische und psychologische Klangprobleme", Die Reihe 1 ("Elektronische Musik", 1955): 22–28; the citation is on pp. 55 and 22, respectively.
5. ^ Sabine Feisst, "Losing Control: Indeterminacy and Improvisation in Music Since 1950", New Music Box (1 March 2002): § "Aleatory—Pierre Boulez".
6. ^ Sabine Feisst, "Losing Control: Indeterminacy and Improvisation in Music Since 1950", New Music Box (1 March 2002): § "Aleatory—Pierre Boulez".
7. ^ Fred Camper, "SN, a film by Fred Camper", 2002.
8. ^ Anon., "Six Reels of Film to Be Shown in Any Order (1971)", BFI Film & TV Database.