Random Futures

The future is assumed to always be a radical departure from the present, but one would hope that the extant human imagination and creativity would remain intact, or have intimate connection with "materials", as they always have. Pure automation can be a boring idea, except for the person doing the automating, or the person patient or observant enough to wait for randomness to offer up an interesting result. In that case, the payoff is always worth the wait.

***

Post-script: Maria Papova's piece Creativity Is Like a Slot Machine is right on point regarding the harnessing of chance and random events: Using photography as a metaphor, you might have an idea for an image, then set up the camera to capture all the "random" events that might be happening during the time of an "exposure". Fishing is another metaphor for capturing something that is always there, yet takes time to catch. David Lynch used that metaphor too.

Popular Posts