Randomness and Pattern

Pattern and randomness (805)

Note 805 copies passages from N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999), with one personal line spliced in ("When I laid there beside you, could you feel me there? My arms were wrapped around you, and I was stroking your neck."). It opens:

"We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d'être of communication - communication is the creation of redundancy or patterning. If information is pattern, then noninformation should be the absence of pattern, that is, randomness."

Each term is defined against the other. Hayles adds that "This pattern/randomness dialectic does not erase the material world; information in fact derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure." The flickering signifiers of the same note are discussed on Mediation and the Archive.

Randomness, Decisions, and Human Nature (852, 908)

Note 908 documents the work, "50 × 40cm – Added in 2012". A typed text sits over a forest photograph on a mint-green ground, crossed by feathery brown strokes. The text is note 852, a course-style statement of purpose whose source the note does not name: "To gain familiarity with the role of luck in business, finance, society, and other matters involving randomness. … To identify the presence of situations where deterministic methods no longer apply. … To understand the relation between human nature and the perception of randomness." 852's Related list links Arp's chance collage (821) and Cloud On Title (846).

Chance, then alignment (878, 821, 856)

The mise en abyme prints (878, c. 2012) were "arranged according to the Laws of Chance, then aligned", in words taken from the title of Jean Arp's collage of 1916–17, which the vault keeps as 821. Beside them the vault files 856, the Museum of Modern Art's label on that collage: "The relatively ordered appearance suggests, however, that the artist did not fully relinquish artistic control." In both works chance sets the material and a hand corrects it. The prints and their image are on Recursion and Self-Reference.

The limit of pure randomness

In Spike #70 (2021/22) the artist describes where random numbers lead: "I have made generative art that is based on random numbers, which enables a wide range of unexpected configurations. This is kind of fun for a while; it's always different. But it's also always the same, in a way, and after a while you get bored, as there's no direction or growth." His answer was breeding: "can I employ genetics in a large series of generative artworks so that instead of just selecting among outputs – like in classic, generative art – I can judge which outputs are better than others, and then breed those and slowly reach some kind of optimal output?" (Spike #70). The criterion that decides which outputs are better is the fitness function, chosen by hand in Death Imitates Language (2016) and by other people in Hybrid Vigor (2017) (→ Evolutionary Logic).

Chance inside rules

Answering Goro Murayama in 2026, he describes another way: "I often use Markov Chains: the distribution of a certain step or operation happening is stochastically determined by the parent the new shape is in" (Murayama Q&A). Inside one composition, each new shape is drawn at random, but from a distribution set by the shape that contains it, and it becomes the container for the next draw. Pattern at the large scale and chance at every step are produced by the same procedure. This memory runs inside a composition. It is a different thing from the independence of successive compositions in Quantizer, where every block on Ethereum seeds a new composition that remembers nothing of the last (→ Quantizer).

He found the same structure in Anni Albers. Random triangles did not reproduce her patterns; she had, he said in 2026, "quite strong stochastic algorithms in her mind" (→ Impulse, Risk, and Method).

The workmanship of uncertainty (609, 709)

Note 609 varies David Pye's distinction between the workmanship of risk and of certainty: "the workmanship of certainty is static, whereas the workmanship of uncertainty is most likely to generate innovation. … Risk provokes an evolutionary mutation through the necessitated gesture of reconciliation of accident." The artist statement (709) puts his own balance this way: "The most valuable moments emerge when the coincidental and the intuitive balance the rational — an irrationality without being esoteric." The sources of 609 are discussed on Impulse, Risk, and Method.

Lexachast: a pool summed and curated

For Lexachast (2016), with Bill Kouligas of PAN and Amnesia Scanner, his algorithms filtered random NSFW imagery from across the internet, and in performance "I live 'curate' the output". Summed, the images produce, in his words, "a 'one-ness' … or unity. A particular feeling", which he compares to all paints mixed into one dark brown-grey. A large enough random pool turns into a single quality; the selection stays his. The full text is on Lexachast (Ableton, 2017).

Decompression

The Our Inner Child text (Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2023) sets the generative work against Mondriaan:

"I thought about the way that painters such as Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg would look at, for example, a tree and take the enormous amount of complexity they would perceive and reduce it to a few shapes or lines to convey its essence. You could think of this as a kind of compression which perhaps reaches its highest level in Mondriaan's grid-like canvases. I thought about what could happen if you moved in the opposite direction, taking something very basic, and applying the capacities of generative art to that form. In that way it becomes a process of decompression, you can move from very simple geometrical shapes to extreme complexities, moving from shapes to the level of pixels."

The word is older than that text. Decompression (2019) is a Mutant Garden print that divides a square into quadrants and each quadrant again, down to small rounded shapes in green, red and blue; Untitled Decompression followed in 2020. On 7 September 2020 he opened an are.na channel titled Language / Decompression with three blocks: the dictionary entry for glob, whose senses are "a small drop" and "a usually large and rounded mass", with his note "I love how this word means its opposite." (block); Damon Zucconi's website The English (block); and his own Hyphenation .xyz (2019) (block).

The Resolution Paintings shown at Upstream run from 85 × 85 cm to 150 × 150 cm, measured diagonally; most are photographic exposures on metallic paper, and two, Altibzz and Pivot, are UltraChrome HD prints on Canson paper. Field (double exposure) divides a sky-blue square into nested squares of pixel patterns, with red, orange and lilac cells scattered through it. The text gives the reason for printing them: "any kind of screen display reduces visual complexity, therefore the only way these works could truly convey their full complexity was to produce them as material objects" (Our Inner Child; summary).

In the Verse interview (January 2024) he puts the contrast with Mondriaan as temperament: "Mondriaan would obsess for a long time, I think, about how a particular composition would have to be, but for me it's actually the opposite. I generate things at random, or I breed generations, and then I curate and manipulate. It's very different, I embrace undecidedness." (Verse interview.)

Pixels: Struggle for Pleasure (2024)

Struggle for Pleasure (Verse SOLOS, London, 2024, curated by Leyla Fakhr) showed the 128-token Struggle for Pleasure collection with four wall objects from Swallow, Only Shallow: Person in a Field, Vortex, A Vale of Tears and Creation of Light, photographic exposures, 100 × 100 cm. The press release, written by William Kherbek from a conversation with the artist, describes simple operations ("mirroring, rotation, repetition, and in particular subdivision") opening onto "territories of complexity where knowledge itself breaks down" (press release; summary).

In the Verse interview he explains what pixels do to the eye: "what is at play with pixels is that our mind tries to interpolate the space between those pixels and construct more complicated entities behind those pixels. By varying the resolution of the pixels within one work, my eyes and my mind was jumping back and forth between feeling that I understood what I saw and constructing what I thought it would be." The animations sharpen step by step, "but nothing more is revealed", and he admits "a certain almost macabre fascination with the low resolution image" (Verse interview summary).

Organic and geometric

The artist states the corollary of decompression directly: "the algorithms and mathematics that produce geometric, systematic, schematic imagery are not radically opposed to nature. The organic and the geometric are not two camps; they sit on a single continuum of complexity" (→ Early Plotter Drawings). The botanical plotter drawings of 2017–18 show a plant as a mesh of straight segments. The later sheets run the other way, from one rule to organic-looking texture: Sediment (2025), one colour-grouping rule over a grid after Vera Molnár's Interruptions; Atlas (2024), a single probability gradient that bends the field into a curvature; Current (2024) and Tract (2026).

His are.na channel Organic Software Forms, opened on 26 November 2017, collects both directions. Its first image of his own, from the opening day, is the silhouette of a trotting horse in a thin blue outline filled with dense vertical zigzag hatching (block): an animal outline turned into machine line. A screenshot of October 2024 goes the other way (block), a sheet of short diagonal strokes, regular at the bottom and breaking toward the top into zigzags and gaps like eroded ground.

The L-system, a few symbol-rewriting rules that grow branching forms, is the plainest case. The plotter drawing Uttered Modality (2018) is built on one, and so, by the artist's account, is Event Listeners (2015), which in Spike #70 he describes as using "relatively simple algorithms to define recursive structures we often find in nature, like how trees branch".

Field (2008, rebuilt on-chain in 2023) is an earlier instance. Loading spinners, interface signs whose only message is wait, are repeated in a grid until, in the artist's words, "they become something like flowers. Or wind turbines. We find ourselves in a large open field: a field without boundaries." Here the organic reading comes from repetition and context, not from decompression (→ Field (2008/2023)).

How the sources resolve it

None of the sources leaves pattern and randomness in a standoff. Each names a mechanism: a fitness function that selects among random variants; chance drawn from distributions that rules set; a random pool curated live; simple rules run to pixel-level complexity. In every case randomness supplies the material and something chosen, a criterion, a rule or a hand, gives it direction.

See also

• Recursion and Self-Reference — the mise en abyme prints and Arp's laws of chance
• Mediation and the Archive — Hayles's flickering signifiers
• Evolutionary Logic — fitness functions
• Impulse, Risk, and Method — note 609, Albers and constrained chance
• Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama (2026) — the Markov chain in his own words
• Lexachast — the summed and curated pool
• Our Inner Child (2023) — compression and decompression
• Struggle for Pleasure (2024) and Verse interview (2024) — pixels and resolution
• Early Plotter Drawings — the organic/geometric continuum in the artist's words
• Angles Morts (2024) — Molnár's imperfections and Embroidery's pen-down threads
• The Grid — the imperfect mirror