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THE ALEATORY, NET ART, MEANING AND US, AND US
To conclude, I would say that if all human activity were random a paper like this one might very well begin with a conclusion. Yet, articles often (not to say always) begin with a preface, introduction or preamble. To inject some randomness in the flow of thought would be just that: to pick haphazardly through a given number of possibilities and let them combine of their own accord. To let oneself be led by the "random" function.
In the beginning of the Web, one could surf while letting this "random" function lead the dance. It was even a game, and an enjoyable one according to users. One didn't choose the destination. Every time you launched the browser, it led you to a different URL, surprising you with a Tasmanian rabbit-raiser's Web site or that of a poet enamoured with Argentinian tarot.
While random navigation is still possible within theme-related Web-rings, it is no longer viable on the Web as a whole; one would likely be sucked into porn or casino sites, which couldn't care less about freedom. However, like a trace of those salad days, when a small number of sites promised the most extraordinary surprises, many art works on the Web have integrated an aleatory element in the browser itself.
Where I Fall is Where I Am
I'm not talking of chance here, of the Pure Luck of the unknown, which has long been feared, even fought, as an equivalent to iniquity - "God does not play dice"1 -, or as a sign of the temporary inability, in science, to come up with a good explanation. Chance will always be an absence or deficiency, whether in one's comprehension of divine intention, or in the advancement in science. The aleatory, however, or randomness, is but one instance from a given, circumscribed set of possibilities. When we draw from the tarot or consult the Chinese divinatory book, the I Ching, we are reestablishing the course of a destiny, whose understanding we reach through interpretation. Chance, too chaotic, has been set aside in favour of the aleatory. Sometimes, in the mind of some artists, the aleatory becomes the doorway to chance…
In Riot2, Mark Napier3 explains that he introduced randomness in his browser to unfetter navigation, and to question notions of property, copyright, and trademarks. Many URLs are brought together in his browser, not ordered entirely according to the hyperreader4. Traces of previous hyperreadings appear in what we see on the screen. The mix of images, text, and URLs results in something different every time - whether it's beautiful, amusing, or significant is left up to the appreciation of each viewer. As with the first generation of Web surfers, or as in spin-the-bottle, the notion of individual choices no longer prevails. The hyperreader no longer has exclusive control. Nevertheless, in Napier's work, one can guide the choice by typing a URL in the location bar, or by choosing one from the bookmarks. One then mixes the random and the determined, leading to semi-controlled (or, conversely, semi-aleatory) navigation.
Based on the same principle of a cross-Url browser, the v.n.a.t.r.c.? collective5 proposes YAST6, which refreshes the window every ten seconds, recombining images, animations, texts, and URLs.
While Napier puts forward a re-conquest of the Web as a form of social subversion, vnatrc uses the aleatory to emphasize aesthetic intentions, without really explaining them7. As each participant is asked to transfer his or her own text and images and the browser acts as a black box, the authors assume by that very fact that the outcome will be of aesthetic interest. No-one will see the same screen, which is partly sufficient to establish the idea of a work of art.
One may wonder: why should the fact that no-one sees the same work be a sign of artfulness? When I look up at the sky, I am certain of never seeing the same spectacle, and am also certain that no-one has seen or will ever see the same thing. Is that enough to make my little corner of the sky a remarkable one? From experience, I know that not to be true.
The same argument could be made of JimPunk's work, ICE8, which presents a permanent recomposition of data, mostly text, taken from the Web or transmitted by hyperreaders themselves. Of course, the issue at hand here, and it is an important one, is that of the author's role and the stance of the work.
Quantum Physics and Artistic Creation
Early in the twentieth century, a major transformation took place in the scientific field - the emergence of quantum physics, of which Max Plank is considered a pioneer. As opposed to Isaac Newton, who imagined the world as a well-ordered clock, quantum physics taught us that the principle of indeterminacy is the only one of which we can be certain. It is possible for a particle to be in one place and in another at the same time; we cannot know both an electron's speed and its position at once9; and, indisputably, we know that two identical causes can produce completely different effects. This demise of determinism might have passed for a pleasant joke if it were not supported by such major discoveries as lasers, atomic particles, and light emitting diodes.
Another consequence of quantum mechanics is that the observer is never neutral, but interacts with the object being observed.
These few lines are enough to make us realize the extent to which we have assimilated the consequences of quantum physics, most of the time without realizing it.
Twentieth-century artist John Cage, a musician who pushed randomness to the fullest in his work, titled one of his pieces Music for . . . - the ellipsis to be completed by the number of musicians present for the performance that day. How better can we demonstrate that the observer of a work - and there may be more than one - acts upon the work, even giving it its name?
Net art, sharing with music the writing of a score that is then interpreted - whether by machine or human makes no difference -, has also integrated in its core what quantum mechanics implies: the end of determinism.
Antoine Schmitt10 writes: "since Planck and Heisenberg, the world has become unpredictable. And if we add Darwin, for whom the randomness of reproduction forms the basis of his theory of evolution, human beings are immersed in a soft context." In one of his pieces, nanoensembles11, randomness intervenes on several levels: "each element moves in its own (semi-random) manner, and the maestro who (attempts to) orchestrate all of it does so in a random manner." For some, the result is comic, for others, beautiful, or fascinating. For my part, it suggests the visual equivalent of repetitive music, whose interpreters have given themselves over to a Vedic trance.
That Schmitt speaks of a programmable maestro should raise an issue for us: does it mean that artists use randomness in their work to avoid making choices, relegating the painful moment to programming? Criticized for using randomness to avoid the problem of choice, John Cage countered: "my choices consist of choosing what questions to ask." Thus, the classic grounding for authorial status - choice - may be set aside by the aleatory.
Alexandre Gherban12 answers the objection with the following: "With the aleatory, the artist/result dialogue becomes permanent: the computer participates in the development of form, it 'answers' by managing processes in its own unpredictable way. The artist finds himself in new territory: the changes he proposes with the program lead to results that depend solely on calculation and on which he no longer has any control."
In one of his works, Sensible aux voyelles13, consonants and vowels move about and scatter until a vowel happens to meet a consonant, generating life, and words, and meaning.
Albert Camus also wrote, of The Rebel (L'homme révolté): "He must however admit that atoms do not aggregate of themselves and, rather than consent to a higher law and, in the end, to the fate he would deny, he accepts a chance movement, the clinamen, by which atoms meet and collide."14
Is Life Random?
After all, we have to ask: why aleatory? As we've seen, some artists have given answers. Still, are there no other reasons?
I long wondered why artists - mainly authors, Net artists, and musicians - espoused that which reduced them to organizing picks-of-the-draw. Until Tibor Papp15, in a conference, defended "chance" in a work of art for the simple reason that, life being full of chance, there was no reason to deny it in art. That was certainly a good reason.
From Annie Abrahams16, to whom I asked why information technologists liked using the "random" function so much, I got much the same response: "precisely because it produces the unexpected, the chaotic, and as such, it's life-like. Take the pleasure people have in looking at flames in a fireplace, it's random; it's the constant change, always the same yet never exactly identical, that attracts (or appeases?) us. The gurgle and flow of water in a creek or a river is the same thing."
In his text, Le même et le différent17, Jean-Pierre Balpe reflects on digital art in much the same terms. For him, what makes a digital work of art, and thus a work of Net art, is not its immediate visual impact, which will naturally always be different, depending on conditions of reception, but the variation (the difference) surrounding the (same) program. And this variation can obviously not occur without a program that can produce a new instance of the work each time - like his generative novel, Trajectoires18, every reader of which will have read a different version.
But is that enough? When Balpe writes: "The digital work's fundamentally innovative contribution to artistic creation is instability," one may suspect inflationary jargon, or that technical achievement has become an end in itself. Yet, when he later writes "Thus, digital art opens itself to experience: life itself is nothing other than the repetition of variations of the same, opened up in time,"19 one must admit what had been suspected from for a while.
If artists choose to work with random functions, it's not to avoid choice - they will have had to make many before completing the work; nor is it to muddle their hyperreaders, nor to play sadistically on our nerves. It's simply to be in the shoes of the character who throws the dice, that tipsy puppeteer whom we assume to preside over our ridiculous destinies.
The artists who've turned the Net into their experimental playground want to reproduce the mix of constraint and the unexpected that weave through our days. They want art to produce more than art, they want it to produce life - unexpected, fickle, changeable, malleable, and at times even insubstantial.
Now, what could prompt some people to vehemently oppose this argument?
Blue Screen20, for instance, considers use of the aleatory a facile device if it is not purposeful and does not serve a critical argument - like those random speech generators21 that prove, through absurdity, the hollowness of politicians' discourse. The aleatory would seem to have become the bible of Net art, a mode, a commodious posture, or imposture.
One of Blue Screen's productions, however, IP Painting22, relies on the aleatory in the course of its realization: the program lying behind IP Painting identifies the IP number of each computer and translates it to a graphic equivalent. The accumulation of visitors during a given session constantly and non-randomly modifies the visual display. But what could be more random than the order in which visitors come to contribute to the work's final appearance? Nothing could have foretold that first this computer would see the work and change it, then that one, then another, and so on.
What more random, also, than all those Google-art pieces23that turn the search engine into the great organizer and open the way to surprise, crossover, nonsense, and movement.
Blue Screen rejects the use of randomness in the name of truth. In an ultimately traditional conception of the artist as the one who forges through the unorganized to find the intangible lode, they hold that the rejected aleatory remains the gateway to chance - that chance, or pure luck, that will never be caught in any code.
Say, here's my introduction!
Randomness seems contrary to the creative act - which delves, sifts, hierarchizes, subsumes within itself a single subject, an islet. Yet, on the Net, which will always surprise with the chance - and the danger - of an encounter that nothing foretold, the random function, finding more than its share of usage, re-deals the cards with every connection, and makes every navigation of each work the gateway to a new discovery, a possibility - a potentiality.
Notes
1 : Albert Einstein, justifying his opposition to quantum physics. 
2: www.potatoland.org
3 : potatoland.com/riot/
4 : The hyperreader is one who reads a work containing hypertexts.
5 : vnatrc.net
6 : vnatrc.net/YAST/index_html
7 : But also see their site aleatoire.org which would seem to support the idea of the aleatory being intrinsically subversive.
8 : ww.jimpunk.com/www/100.000.000.000.000
9 : Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle."
10 : www.gratin.org/as/
11 : www.gratin.org/as/nanos/index.html
12 : gherban.free.fr
13: gherban.free.fr/&oeuvres_gherban/sens_voyel.htm
14 : Albert Camus (1951). The Rebel : An Essay on Man in Revolt.
15 : www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/hungary/h-papp.htm
16 : www.bram.org and in particular www.bram.org/attention/index.php
17 : transitoireobs.free.fr/to/article.php3?id_article=11
18 : www.etudes-francaises.net/entretiens/balpe.htm
19 : transitoireobs.free.fr/to/article.php3?id_article=11
20 : www.b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net
21 : www.charabia.net
22 : www.b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net
23 : vpar.net/vpar.php?prg=selection&no=453&ed=2003
Xavier Malbreil
(Translated from French by Ron Ross)
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