The article talked about the concept of “chance” and the artworks that involve chance through a historical perspective. As one of the artists that applied chance in the artworks, Jackson Pollock attracted my attention, so I searched the internet for his artwork–“one: number31,1950”.
（this photograph was downloaded from the internet)
Frankly speaking, it is really hard to create a similar version of this piece, for so many chances get involved during the painting process, but through the following “recipe” which I concluded after searching for this artwork, we can create something personally unique with the painting methods used by Pollock.
1.Place a large canvas on the floor. Try to avoid physical contact with the canvas while painting.
2.Prepare for fluid white, black, blue, grey colored paints. Collect sticks, rigid brushes and other things as painting tools.
3.Use the tools to drip, drizzle, splash the paints, or simply just pour the paints onto the canvas while moving around the canvas, so that the paints landing on the canvas can reflect your movements.
4.Repeat step3 several times, and make sure the paints are all over the canvas so that there are no focuses on the canvas.
5.You can also apply some innovative ways of spreading paints onto canvas.
As mentioned in the article, there are some techniques designed to reduce bias. One way is to create a compound of independent events, reducing the influences every event may cause on each other. The other way is to number the things involved and select them with digits other than eyes to avoid bias in selection. Translating these techniques into interactive computer programing seems imageable to me, although I haven’t grasped the specific programing skills to realize it.
In the article, “chance-imagery is associated with scientific advances, and it reminds me that art is always closely related to the wider cultural environment of the time it is produced, as the development of science and other things always hugely influence the artists in many ways (techniques, ideas…). But in my point of view, it is not the duty of art to reflect these things, although the reflections are unavoidable. Some surrealistic artists might not think about the cultural backgrounds while creating artworks, but it turned out that their works are easy for later people to recognize for its characteristic of the particular time.
Inspired by the article, I tried to design my own methodology to produce a truly random number:
1.throw a dart on the world map, take notes of the latitude (number a) and the longitude (number b).
2.open a dictionary, turn it to page of number a, count how many words are there on the page.
3.open a music playlist and find the song ranks number b, count the length of the song.