Aleatoricism is the creation of art by chance, exploiting the principle of randomness. The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice. It should not be confused with improvisation.
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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].[1]
Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his book The Virtual Muse.[2]
Music
Main article: Aleatoric musicPierre Boulez applied the term aleatoric music to his own pieces to distinguish them from the indeterminate music of John Cage, 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 Stockhausen.[3] 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'[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)[4] 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).[5]
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
- ^ Rhinehart, Luke (1971), The Dice Man, ISBN 0900735007
- ^ Hartman, Charles (1996), The Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0819522392 (see especially pp. 54–64.)
- ^ Sabine Feisst, "Losing Control: Indeterminacy and Improvisation in Music Since 1950", New Music Box (1 March 2002): § "Aleatory—Pierre Boulez".
- ^ Fred Camper, "SN, a film by Fred Camper", 2002.
- ^ Anon., "Six Reels of Film to Be Shown in Any Order (1971)", BFI Film & TV Database.
Categories: Artistic techniques
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Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica
We cannot continue to foster a system which picks out winners from losers and treats education as if it were an aleatory exercise, condemning some seemingly unfortunate students to a lifestyle of illiteracy. Education has to be approached in a more ...
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The Aleatory Project an experiment in fate Thought for Food Productions presents The Aleatory Project by Helen Juvonen
