By Chance, Randomness and Indeterminacy Methods in Art and Design

Journal of Visual Art Practice

ISSN: 1470-2029 (Print) 1758-9185 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjvp20

By chance, randomness and indeterminacy methods in art and design

Lily Díaz

To cite this article: Lily Díaz (2011) By chance, randomness and indeterminacy methods in art and design, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 10:1, 21-33 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1386/jvap.10.1.21_1

Published online: 03 Jan 2014.

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LILY DÍAZ University of Art and Design Helsinki

By chance, randomness and indeterminacy methods in art and design

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This essay investigates randomness and indeterminacy as art and design research design methods. A brief survey of contemporary notions of design is presented. There is a epistemology review of randomness and indeterminacy in the works of artists such as Jean Arp, indeterminacy Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and John Cage as well as in design research meth- method ods such as brainstorming and synectics. The author argues that the techniques in practice which these phenomena are implicated, make use of a reflection in action (or episte- randomness mology of practice) where a desired outcome is the methodical quest for the new.

1. INTRODUCTION Creating unique and engaging design requires methodical research and experimentation. Quantitative and qualitative research methods borrowed from the humanities and social sciences, for example, have proven effective in yielding knowledge about behaviour throughout the design process. However, they have yet to offer ways in which to bring forth and deliver new and creative results. Situations where there is a need to develop innovation and find new solutions require different methods. Though there is a growing literature about design methods that seek to address these

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needs, there is very little research probing this area where serendipity meets coincidence. Alexander (1964, 2002) described the problem as finding the fit between form and context. John Chris Jones (1992) focused on design activity and philosophy. He documented two methods that are discussed in this article. More recently, Nelson and Stolterman (2003: 16) have advocated a design culture and a first new tradition where design is seen as the ability to imagine ‘that-which-does-not-yet exist, and make it appear in concrete form as a new, purposeful addition to the real world’. Nigel Cross (2006: 23–27) has proposed that the reliance on generating fairly quickly a satisfactory solution is a key aspect of design activity. Rather than attempting to generate one hypotheti- cally optimum solution, designers aim at producing a large range of satisfactory solutions. According to Cross, a fair amount of the knowledge – or designerly ways of knowing – that designers develop as part of their working methods, is related or resides in the material culture that designers work with. In this article, I investigate the use of chance and randomness as methods in design and art, and their role in the production of the new. Needless to say the topic touches on the territory of human agency. In the present text, however, I choose to focus on practical reasoning, or knowledge and understanding as approached from an experiential, tacit and embodied perspective. The use of chance is, in my opinion, compatible with the currently held notion of design as goal-oriented behaviour, enacted with the intention to produce a given result. Throughout the activity of design, the designer posits an objec- tive and procures and utilizes the means to achieve it. The notion of ‘result’, however, needs to be further qualified. For in design, result can be seen as equivalent to effecting a transformation within a given set of parameters. What the actual transformation will be is not completely known at the beginning of the design process. So the designer must be able to keep an open mind to discovery. I describe examples of the methodical use of chance and indeterminacy in art and design. First, I present examples of the work of Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp and Andy Warhol. Second, I present two methods, brainstorming and synectics, that make use of chance and randomness in order to increase the set of available options to the designer. Then I return to art and make a deeper presentation and examination of John Cage’s ‘Musicircus’ as an example of an artwork that makes use of chance and indeterminacy. Cage’s work is of inter- est in the current discussion because while retaining the identity of its maker, it continues to enable others to participate in the creation of new understand- ings of music and art. In bringing these examples together I want to highlight ways through which artists and designers have consciously used chance and indeterminacy to introduce new variables, to reframe the problem, and to enable new parameters to emerge within the creative process. I propose that the articu- late use of such strategies is the result of a type of ‘reflection-in-action’ (an epistemology) that occurs in the context of a practice. ‘The researcher is not ‘dependent on the categories of established theory and technique but constructs a new theory of the unique case’ (Schön 1983: 68).

2. RANDOMNESS AND INDETERMINACY Randomness is a quality attributed to outcomes, such as things and events lacking predictable pattern(s), or purpose. According to Gregory Bateson, without

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a source of randomness, no system (mechanical or organic) could produce anything novel:

… in the stochastic processes (see Glossary) either of evolution or of thought, the new can be plucked from nowhere but the random. (Bateson 1988, 2002: 46)

In computer science, for example, random-number generators are commonly used to ensure that the ‘seek’, trial and error moves of the machine cover all the possibilities of the set to be explored. This led Bateson (2002: 174) to ascertain that all creative systems were divergent. Throughout history this concept has been closely related to fate and games, since in many cultures artefacts such as dice, runes and shells have been used as part of divination procedures to determine destiny. It is interesting to note that this is quite the opposite of the traditional view of design. Already in the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari was proposing that the ancestral origins of the practice were to be found in the meticulous planning of an artwork (Vasari 1975; Greenhalgh 1997). In recent times, new situations have come to the forefront where techniques of randomness and chance, and art and design, have been explicitly brought together. One noted case was in the early twentieth century when artists involved with Dadaism used chance and randomness to create art that expressed their opposition to society and critiqued the traditional notions of artistic mastery and excellence (Pierre 1975). According to the web archive of the ‘Dada’ exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, a driving motive behind ‘Dada’ was a desire to challenge traditional concep- tions of art and the artist, and through their work demonstrate that art also relied on arbitrary decision-making (National Gallery of Art 2006). From this intentional use of chance, there resulted works such as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades created with found objects and the collages of Jean Arp. Duchamp’s ready-mades involved the use of discovered objects that with minimum manipulation were presented as art. Among the most famous of these artefacts was the upside-down urinal. According to the artist, the ready- mades used found objects that had already been completed and were there- fore beyond the artist’s control. Such use of indeterminacy produced unique works, because they enabled the artist to get rid of notions such as taste or habit. As Duchamp stated, ‘I had to pick an object without it impressing me and, as far as possible without the least intervention of any idea or suggestion of aesthetic pleasure’ (Durham 2002). Legend has it that Arp discovered the ‘law of chance’ when frustrated at his inability to arrive at a desired form, he tore the paper to pieces and tossed the scraps on the floor. In the chance arrangement that resulted, he recognized the composition he could not achieve through conscious engagement. Arp believed that through chance, the artist could summon providential guidance to his aid. In this exercise he saw an act of self-negation for the artist, and an opportunity to access the subconscious as a source of inspiration. By eliminating the will, or direct intervention, of the artist in the making of the work, Arp sought to elevate chance to a philosophical principle. According to Arp, the most successful artist was attentive to these external influences since ‘chance in the art of our time, is nothing accidental but a gift of the muses’ (Durham 2002). Another, more recent, example of the use of randomness in the creation of art was used by Andy Warhol to produce many of his well-known

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Figure 1: Graphic visualization informs the audience of the variety of performances happening simultaneously across four different floors of the Tate Gallery in London during the Musicircus held in 2006.

commercial drawings. In these drawings, which were reproduced using line art printing techniques, Warhol used a blotted-line style produced by drawing in ink on non-absorbent paper and then pressing the wet image onto a fresh sheet of paper. Lupton and Miller have proposed that the use of this technique ‘complicated an otherwise ordinary contour, interrupting the controlled medium of drawing with a chance process’ (1999: 79). At this point it might be useful to consider the difference between indeterminacy and randomness. It could be argued that whereas randomness is related to the presence of patterns, the term indeterminacy refers to the state of something not being fixed conclusively. Chance deals with interaction through time and indeterminacy refers to the framework, context or manner of use in which the patterns themselves potentially acquire meaning, and how open or closed these boundary conditions are. While ‘randomness’ can be used as a direct description of an object, process, or event, ‘indeterminacy’ can be regarded as a second order meta-communicative frame (Bateson 2000: 177–193) denoting a class, and thus conveying information about how something is to be interpreted. As a class of artworks indeterminate artworks can possess a structural organization that is open (e.g. not specified). As we present later in John Cage’s Musicircus, in an indeterminate work of art, an artist might leave parameters such as Space, or Time of Duration, open. An indeterminate work of art can also make use of randomness, or random processes, such as in the selection of found objects in Duchamp’s Readymades. In this way, novelty can result through simply introducing something that was not there before. Or, it can also come about as a result of a change to the boundaries of the frame, or the context in which the object or event is to be regarded. The new elements introduced can simply be found, borrowed or enabled to emerge by the artist or designer. As in Warhol’s case, introducing

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a volatile element through the use of non-absorbent paper into the technique brings chance into the final results because of how it produces surprising, or unpredictable, results.

3. DESIGN METHODS AND RANDOMNESS AND CHANCE The doing of design has been described as premeditated intervention or goal- oriented activity concerned with planning a course of action (Rittel 1987). This characterization can, at least initially, appear misleading since it tends to give an impression that design activity occurs in a neat and linear manner that follows predictable cause and effect patterns. More recently, the processes of design have further been qualified as iterative (Carroll 2000), meaning that diverse possibilities of action in order to achieve a desired state are contemplated. It has also been depicted as compositional since it ‘pulls a variety of elements into relationships with one another’ (Nelson and Stolterman 2003: 22). From a communications perspective, design can also be said to be a dialogue that involves aspects of translation: an idea (or proposal) is articu- lated through iterative cycles. Diverse elements and participants are brought together through this design dialogue, which stands as a pause, in a dynamic world of sometimes linear, but more often than not chaotic, processes, events and flows. In order to transform, or reify, his or her ideas into something of the real world, the designer makes use of models and a variety of representa- tions. From this perspective, design goes beyond the simple action of finding ideas to be developed, and can be seen as a practice that engages with a world that exists in a constant state of flux.

3.1 Brainstorming The term brainstorming is attributed to Alex Osborn and used to describe a method that uses free association in order to generate ideas (Sawyer 2006: 121). Brainstorming is a method that makes use of unrestricted and intuitive thinking. Among the basic principles of brainstorming is that quan- tity is important so that participants should aim to produce a large number of ideas. Also during the brainstorming sessions, there should be an open atmosphere where participants are encouraged to speak their mind. This means that criticism should not be allowed. Additionally, combinations of ideas are to be encouraged so that participants should also suggest how the ideas of others could be improved (Proctor 1999: 116). The ideas collected during a brainstorming session, should be organized and classified into sets. These classifi- cations in turn can be used as a guide to further develop new ways of looking at a design proposal (Jones 1992).

3.2 Synectics Brainstorming has been deemed a suitable creative problem-solving method when dealing with open-ended situations that can have more than one possible solution. However, the method may not be enough when the need involves refor- mulating the conceptual structure of a design proposal. What is needed is a method that enables a new structural design representation to emerge. One way in which such a transformation can be enacted is through the mapping of the understanding of one domain of knowledge onto another. Synectics

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is such a method that ‘focuses on using analogies as catalysts for creativity’ (Sawyer 2006: 298). Synectics involves bringing together different and appar- ently irrelevant elements through the use of metaphors and analogy (Gilhooly 1996: 229). An unfamiliar problem might perhaps be better understood when represented using an analogy that makes use of something familiar. Or it may be the opposite, where an over familiar problem that is difficult to regard in a different way can be handled by using an unusual metaphor, or ‘making the familiar strange’ (Hummel 2006). According to Jones, synectics focuses on the perception of form, on imaging capacity and on motor interaction, in order to enable a type of ‘switching’ of knowledge patterns between domains (Jones 1992). In order to generate ideas, the method makes use of four types of analogy: (1) personal analogy, (2) direct analogy, (3) symbolic analogy and (4) fantasy analogy. In personal analogy, one should aim to identify with a part, or all, of the phenomenon. If one is seeking to understand the molecular structure of a compound, for example, one might think of oneself as a molecule. Direct analogy involves a search to find similar situations in other domains. According to Gordon, this method was used by Alexander Graham Bell as he realized that the bones of the human ear were very massive when compared to the delicate and thin membrane that operated them. In Bell’s mind it seemed a reasonable assumption that a thicker and stouter piece of membrane could also move a piece of steel. Thus, the telephone was born (Halpern 2003: 385). Symbolic analogy involves creating a compressed description of the problem or solution in image form. Fantasy analogy involves using wishful thinking and unrealis- tic ideas in the proposal (Gilhooly 1996). William J. J. Gordon and George Prince developed synectics in the 1960s as part of their work to find creative problem solutions. A key aspect of the method is that it seeks to disengage participants from the limitations of binary thinking in favour of multiplicity:

Conventional treatment of ideas makes two assumptions about the nature of ideas: first that they are monolithic entities and second that their value is binary – good or bad. Our experience is that both these assumptions are incorrect and destructive. An idea is not monolithic, it has many facets. There is always something good about an idea. (Proctor 1999: 157)

Brainstorming and synectics are two methods that employ randomness and chance strategies as part of design activity. One might ponder over the simi- larities in the reasoning used to spontaneously develop ideas in a brainstorming session and the random encounter and selection of found objects. Does the act of placing a found object into the context of an art exhibition for example, bear resemblance to the act of classifying randomly generated ideas into sets? How and when are the boundaries of an art or design work determined? When is the search deemed to be over? What factors define the work so that it becomes a collage, or a ready-made?

4. THE NON-INTENTIONAL MUSIC OF JOHN CAGE John Cage was an American music composer, a writer and a visual artist widely known for his conceptual approaches that made use of both indeterminacy and randomness. Cage was an early proponent of what is called aleatory

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music, or music in which some of the elements are left to be decided through indeterminate methods. Distinct from music made with particular results in mind, an indeterminate piece is one created without any intention. Rather than specifying the sounds and sound successions to be performed, Cage provided a specific set of instructions, or rules, that often involved the use of chance methods (like the throwing of dice). Following these rules, he would either create a score or create the conditions for the performers themselves to make the notational symbols, with the result that no two performances were ever the same (Pritchett 1993). Cage’s use of random methods is central to his musical style, and there- fore a basic question in understanding his work is that of why these methods were selected by the artist. Though his works were sometimes regarded as controversial, like many of the artists of his time Cage is also remembered for raising deep philosophical questions, many of which ponder about the nature of art itself. Cage’s views on the subject, which are expressed in an early mani- festo called The Future of Music, were based on the idea that the raw matter of music is happening all around us. In his role as a composer, Cage sought to use the sound noises of everyday reality not as effects, but as musical instruments (Goldberg 1988: 123).

5. MUSICIRCUS, CHANCE AND PERFORMANCE

‘You won’t hear a thing. You will hear everything’. John Cage.

A fusion of the words ‘music’ and ‘circus’, ‘Musicircus’ is sometimes described as a work of music, at other times as a performance event, or even as an idea for a piece. A taxonomic description from a catalogue of John Cage’s works on the Internet identifies the work as a musical composition (Chaudron). Since its first performance in 1967 that reputedly included musicians, dancers, mimes, vocalists, films, slides, black lights, balloons, cider and popcorn, ‘Musicircus’ has been regarded as a festival of serendipity.

5.1 A (non-)structured structure The event, which was first performed on 17 November 1967 at the University of Illinois’ Stock Pavilion, was not to be limited to traditional performance spaces and venues, but could happen anywhere. In the original performance a venue that had been intended for the exposition of cattle and rodeo events was used. Through the years, however, the event has been held at a multitude of locations, from the museum venue of the 2006 London Tate Gallery Musicircus that the author of this article attended, to the university setting of the first Latin American Musicircus performance in the ‘XVIII Festival of Contemporary Music’ held in Santiago, Chile in 2008. According to Cage’s instructions, the space was to be arranged according to marked areas, or focuses of performance, that allowed for the audience to walk around different, simultaneous, events (Winship 2006). In his musical compositions, Cage abandoned the classical performance model in which the audience sits in the theatre passively watching the action as it unfolds on the imaginary plane formed by the proscenium. He did this by obliterating the centralized figure of the conductor as the coordinating element. Through the introduction of simultaneity, he created the conditions for a very personal experience of music. The core idea was that no single person would experience

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the performance in its entirety. Instead, each member of the audience would create his or her own individual version of the piece, and this would be determined by where he or she might be situated in a given moment and by the events on which he or she chose to focus from moment to moment. In order to further differentiate Musicircus from a traditional event, Cage indicated that there should be a beginning and an end; that it should last longer than an ordinary concert; and the performance should not have clearly marked divisions such as an opening act, an intermission or an encore. In this manner time could be used in an arbitrary way.

You simply bring together under one roof as much music (as many musical groups and soloists) as practical under the circumstances. It should last longer than ordinary concerts, starting at 7 or 8 in the evening, and continuing, say, to midnight. Arrange performers on plat- forms or within roped-off areas. There must be plenty of space for the audience to walk around. If you have more groups than places, make a schedule […]. There should be food on sale and drinks (as at a circus). Dancers and acrobats. (Cage as quoted in Winship 2006)

The experience then would not be limited by location, but rather dependent on the trajectory and what events participants would choose to focus on from moment to moment. In terms of content, Musicircus was planned as a carnival of heterogene- ity. It had to bring together aspects from diverse and disparate genres: there should be dancers and acrobats, as well as food and drinks on sale throughout the performance. Cage also indicated that performers were free to create their own performances. In ‘Musicircus’, Cage broke away from traditional notions of space, time and content in regard to how music should be created, performed and listened. This highlights a central theme in Cage’s work, namely the difference between understanding and experience. According to Cage, understanding does not lead to experience, but only to a certain use of critical faculties (Konstelanetz 2003: 250).

5.2 Musicircus at the Tate, London London’s Tate Gallery Musicircus lasted a total of three hours and brought together dozens of musicians and performers with the hundreds of visitors who participated in the potpourri of music and art. The iconoclastic treatment of space, where the performance wove a carnival thread through the multiple floors of the gallery, had the effect of creating a different type of museum experience. For an afternoon, the Gallery resembled a fair, with museum visitors ambulating through the halls looking at the art on the walls but also, stop- ping for brief moments to observe and listen to the performances. Musicians and performers moved about: up and down the escalators, as they mingled and chatted with the visitors. As Cage had hoped for in the original, the Tate Gallery’s Musicircus did make for a heightened and personal experience of music, which in this case also included the museum environment. The photograph in Figure 3, for example, depicts the notation score created by a vocalist for her performance in the Musicircus at the Tate. The visual script in the pages depicts the elements of this artist’s performance.

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Figure 2: A ‘Musicircus’ is composed of several autonomous centres or focuses of performance. The image shows one of these performance areas during the 2006 Musicircus at London’s Tate Gallery. Photograph © Lily Díaz, 2006.

Figure 3: In ‘Musicircus’, performers are free to organize and conduct their own performance. Photograph of a notation score by soprano Linda Hurst for a vocal performance of John Cage’s 1958 work Aria in the Tate Gallery Musicircus. Photograph © Lily Díaz, 2006.

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Figure 4: Like other works in Cage’s non-intentional music, a ‘Musicircus’ can feature the use of traditional instruments in a novel manner, for example, to create non-traditional sounds. The image shows Marina Rosenfeld’s Sheer Frost Orchestra using nail polish containers as guitar picks. Photograph © Lily Díaz, 2006.

The conflation of events and diverse forms of interaction – from the restricted behaviour expected from the traditional visit to an art gallery with the freer exchanges of the festival-type atmosphere – raised interesting and critical questions with respect to the nature of events in heritage institutions and the consumption of culture. Is it the educational content or aesthetic experience that makes a visit to this type of public space memorable? Can we design exhibition genres so as to enable the audience to contribute their own intellectual and affective narratives, when the exhibitions vary depending on the audience perception and activities? It is fair to conclude that the performance event added a new dimension to the traditional experience of the museum. Its continued presence in the musical repertoire demonstrates how, though not yet canonical, Musicircus belongs to a class of objects with a clearly recognized artistic identity and heritage. At the same time, it is also evidence of the viability of works that have open structures that enable their reinterpretation in a diversity of contexts.

5.3 Musicircus: A way of making music The art of John Cage is interesting for design because of the way in which selected conditions and parameters that play a role in defining music event are either intentionally altered or left open in order to propitiate the emer- gence of serendipity, or an aesthetics of non-intention. Cage proposed that he had found two ways to do this. One was Musicircus, or the ‘simultaneity of unrelated intentions’ and the other was ‘music of contingency (improvisation using instruments in which there is a discontinuity between cause and effect)’ (Konstelanetz 2003: 64).

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This aesthetics of non-intentionality is embedded in Cage’s idea of music and art as free activities that are not tied to the creator’s ego. One of the ways that it was carried out was through the element of simultaneity present in works like ‘Musicircus’. Through the multiplication of intentions, or the presence of multiple concurrent performances, there emerges an absence of intention (Konstelanetz 2003: 158). Since it is impossible to apprehend an entire performance, the listener experiences the music as if it were his or her own action. This action is contingent on a trajectory through an array of simultaneous performances. In this manner different people will enjoy the music in different ways.

6. DISCUSSION AND REMARKS It could be said that in their work, the artists presented in this article questioned established ontological definitions regarding the nature of art and music and the role of the author. Through their use of chance and randomness, both Duchamp and Arp challenged the role of the artist as author and the procedures through which novel art emerges. Since a variation of one of the parameters opens up the framework, enabling chance and variation, Warhol’s use of method raised questions about a technique’s direct ability to produce the desired results. Technique is ultimately brought back to the embodied and intellectual capabilities of the artist, who decides how it is used. Similarly, the design methods discussed challenge some commonly held notions of ideas – they are not completely good or bad – and the contexts in which they emerge and exist are indeed polysemic. This brings us back to the topic briefly introduced in the initial section, namely the epistemology in action and what this means in practice. Describing what such epistemology constitutes is a project beyond the scope of the present article. However, I still want to compromise myself by situating it as a way of knowing, comfortably lodged between innovative art inquiry and methodical design practice. In the context of the works and methods presented, such epistemology is about perceiving the possibilities of change in everything. More and more we exist in this vulnerable world of fragile connections in a constant state of flux. Here knowledge begins with the senses in the present and sinks deeper. Our response to this world is one of adaptation and inventiveness, so that at least initially our knowledge is tacit and resourceful, but not easily externalized. As in the case of the ready-mades, an epistemology in action promotes sustenance through reuse so that everything that is possible is employed in new ways. There is no need to fear the copy, the imperfect or the incomplete because the emphasis is on the present and how there is always a new possible reading. It deals with encounters in and with the world and the meaning-making processes instantiated through our interactions: our human culture and its quest for meaning extends into a world out there. Since it originates within contexts that are of multiple meanings, it is syncretic. This means that it mixes traditions, and while it simultaneously respects the old it also allows new forms to emerge. Because it can successfully mediate between the canonical contexts of culture and the more arbitrary, yet embodied, world of belief and desires, it might lean towards narrative in form.

7. CONCLUSION In this article, I have presented some examples dealing with the use of randomness and indeterminacy in design methods and in twentieth-century western art in order to investigate the topic of how the new comes into being. In my

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exposition, I have sought to highlight the use of these as part of consciously planned interventions leading into new territories. It has been said that the greater the impact, dissemination and accept- ance of a new invention, the higher the probability that it will recede into the background of the prosaic. Considering the ubiquitous and almost transpar- ent nature of simple, yet once revolutionary, artefacts such as the paper clip, one cannot help but wonder then how it is that the new, that which is different and unfamiliar, comes into being in the world? It might have been the irony of this paradox that prompted the art histo- rian George Kubler to comment on how ‘Inventions that are commonly thought to mark great leaps are actually one[s] with the humble substance of everyday behaviour, whereby we exercise our freedom to vary our actions a little’ (Kubler 1962, 1969: 62). Because of their role in developing innovation, simple randomness and chance processes used in art and design can be of importance to all human fields dealing with the search for the new. It is of utmost importance for design not to abandon but rather stake a claim and make use of its artistic heritage.

REFERENCES Alexander, C. (1964, 2002), Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bateson, G. (1988, 2002), Mind and Nature, New York: Hampton Press. Bateson, G. (1972, 2000), Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press. Carroll, J. (2000), Making Use, Scenario-based Design of Human Computer Interactions, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Chaudron, A. (2007), ‘Musicircus in the John Cage Database’, http://www. johncage.info/workscage/musicircus.html. Accessed 13 January 2007. Chile Musicircus (2010), http://www.musicircus.cl/. Accessed 16 October 2010. Clarín (2008), ‘Musicircus, de John Cage, por primera vez en Latinoamerica’/‘For the First Time in Latin America, John Cage’s Music Circus’, 6 November, http://www.elclarin.cl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13 821&Itemid=1. Accessed 2 October 2010. Cross, N. (2007), Designerly Ways of Knowing, Basel: Birhäuser Architecture. Durham, A. L. (2002), ‘The Random Muse: Authorship and Indeterminacy’, William and Mary Law Review, 44. Gilhooly, K. J. (1996), Thinking, Directed, Undirected and Creative, London: Academic Press. Goldberg, R. (1988), Performance Art, From Futurism to the Present, London: Thames and Hudson. Greenhalgh, P. (1997), ‘The History of Craft’, in P. Dormer (ed.), The Culture of Craft, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Halpern, D. F. (2003), Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hummel, L. (2006), ‘Synectics for Creative Thinking in Technology Education: An Instructor Using Synectics and Creative Problem-Solving Techniques Can Teach Students to Solve a Multitude of Academic Challenges’, The Technology Teacher, 66: 3. Jones, C. J. (1992), Design Methods, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Konstelanetz, R. (2003), Conversing with Cage, London: Routledge. Kubler, G. (1962, 1969), The Shape of Time, Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Lupton, E. and Miller, D. (1999), ‘Line Art, Andy Warhol, and the Commercial Art World of the 1950’s’, Design Writing Research, Writing on Graphic Design, New York: Phaidon. Miller, D. P. (2003), ‘The Shapes of Indeterminacy: John Cage’s Variations I and Variations II’, FZMw Jg, 6, http://www.fzmw.de/2003/2003_2.htm. Accessed 13 January 2007. Nelson, H. G. and Stolterman, E. (2003), The Design Way, Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World, Englewoods Cliff, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. National Gallery of Art (2006), ‘Dada’, 19 February–14 May 2006, http://www. nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dada/techniques/chance.shtm#null. Accessed 2 October 2010. Patterson, D. (2006), ‘About Musicircus’, Musicircus, Chicago Composers Forum, http://musicircus.chicagocomposers.org/about.html. Accessed 24 September 2006. Pierre, J. (1975), ‘Futurismi ja Dadaismi’, Taiteen mailmaanhistoria, Ex Libris, Helsinki. Pritchett, J. (1993), The Music of John Cage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vasari, Giorgio, (1550, 1975), Vasari on Technique, Being in the Introduction of the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Reprint, Baldwin Brown, ed., New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Proctor, T. (1999), Creative Problem Solving for Managers, London: Routledge. Rittel, H. W. J. (1987), ‘The Reasoning of Designers’, International Congress of Planning and Design Theory, Boston, MA, http://www.cc.gatech. edu/~ellendo/rittel/rittel.html. Accessed 17 October 2010. Sawyer, K. P. (2006), Explaining Creativity. The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schön, D. A. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action, New York, NY: Basic Books. Winship, S. (2006), ‘Chicago: The Greatest Show on Earth’, New Music Box, Web Magazine of the American Music Center, 5 January 2006, http://www. newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=4476. Accessed 17 October 2010.

SUGGESTED CITATION Díaz, L. (2011), ‘By chance, randomness and indeterminacy methods in art and design’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 10: 1, pp. 21–33, doi: 10.1386/ jvap.10.1.21_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Lily Díaz is an artist, designer, and researcher working in the area of informatics and interactive digital media. Currently she is professor and head of research in the Department of Media of the School of Art and Design at Aalto University in Helsinki. Her art and design work has been exhibited in galleries such as the Royal Academy of Art in London, the Martin Gropius Bau Museum in Berlin, Planetario Alfa in Monterrey Mexico and Design Museum Helsinki. She has conducted research and development projects in areas such as visualization and information design, design and implementation of digital archives related to cultural heritage, and design of interfaces for virtual reality. E-mail: [email protected]

JVAP 10.1_Diaz_21-33.indd 33 6/4/11 2:11:08 PM The Poster

ISSN 2040-3704 (1 issue | Volume 1, 2010)

Editors Aims and Scope

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