Dream Politics: Randomness in Network Art

Dream Politics: Randomness in Network ArtLewis LaCookhttp://www.lewislacook.com

INTRODUCTION: Stochastic Computing


Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin–your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.

Hakim Bey, Chaos, The Temporary Autonomous Zone



————————————————————————————————————————————————–



Computers have a difficult time with spontaneity. By themselves, they're as predictable as any fundamentalist. This is what makes computer programming possible, the assurance I have that the code I write will be executed exactly as I wrote it. If I write a conditional loop, my computer will make a decision based on the parameters I feed to it; it won't take into account the weather, nor its own emotional state, nor will it ever be hung over from ten too many Guinesses and perform the function haphazardly from behind the haze of a violent headache. Computers, it would seem are very clean machines, not subject to noise or entropy. What you code is what you get.

This, naturally, hasn't stopped humans from introducing randomness into the computer. Most high-level programming languages have a function to simulate random numbers; and, while said numbers are very often predictable, the results can sometimes seem just as authentically random as more adroit sources of randomness. "True random numbers, captured in the wild, are clearly superior to those bred in captivity by pseudo-random generators