Chance
Related: fate - found art - random - accident
Literature: An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966)
The Diceman (1971) - Luke Rhinehart [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
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 dice.
An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966) - Daniel Spoerri, Roland Topor
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]Daniel Spoerri's 1966 classic, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance ... is a sort of verbal "snare picture" which "documents in loving, indulgent, but never boring detail the history of every morsel of detritus situated on a table in Spoerri's Paris flat." --http://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/index.html [Oct 2006]
Aleatory art
Aleatory (or aleatoric) means "pertaining to luck". Aleatoric art is that which exploits the principle of randomness. A common form of aleatoric art is aleatoric music. One of the most ambitious aleatory projects in poetry is Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatory [Jul 2004]Aleatoric music
Pierre 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. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatory [Oct 2006]
Aleatoric Film
In film-making, there are several avant-garde examples; 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, seven reels long which takes the word aleatory quite literally by including a customized die for the projectionist to roll to determine the reel order (5040 permutations). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatory [Oct 2006]
Accidental art
When conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage began introducing ordinary life and accident into art, they acknowledged the paradox of the void. The interrupted narrative, the fractured construct, the disorder of everyday life — in art, that's a tip of the hat to the void, to the absence of God, the absence of hierarchy, the absence of order and truth and harmony and hegemony. -- Linda Frye Burnham
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