lus to artistic creation; it encouraged the use of free association, fragmentary trains of thought, and unexpected juxtapositions. A notable example is the work of Duchamp, who harnessed indeterminate and accidental actions to create “Network of Stoppages”—tracing outlines of strings he randomly dropped from the height of one meter [ 3]. In music, John Cage devised what he called chance or aleatoric music, consisting of elements that are chosen by chance, via dice or the I Ching [ 4]. In literature, Samuel Beckett wrote “Lessness,” a prose piece in which he used random permutation to order sentences. The aleatoric piece is experienced as a process that depends upon the reader’s attempts to comprehend and create meaning [ 5].

In the hands of artists, randomness is a creative tool to inspire and generate innovative outputs: a means to an end. Our encounters with such outputs may result in a range of affective and experiential outcomes, such as ambiguity, senselessness, and unpredictability. These may lead to reactions of surprise, delight, shock, and even disgust, yet during these experiences we remain the readers, the audience, the interpreters, and the consumer of these random-led outputs.

Randomness during use. The growth of digital interactivity has been accompanied by a burgeoning legion of interactives that express certain qualities of randomness during use. We see this in blogs, Web surfing and searching, and music listening where people are interacting directly with randomness.

Bloggers can use random text generators or plug-in tools to

Network of Stoppages, Marcel Duchamp

 

generate interesting and unexpected content, such as random graphics or “quotes of the day” on their blogs. Although content is generated, most bloggers’ aims are different than those of the experimental artists. The latter are not only interested in generating innovative output: In most cases, they are also very selective about the actual aesthetics of the output.

Randomwebsearch.com promises to “help you waste your time more efficiently” by giving visitors the ability to simply click a button to randomly generate a word that is then searched for on the Web. More recently, stumble-upon.com created a browser plug-in that helps users find interesting Web pages they may not have thought to search for. After defining some general areas of interest, a person need only click the “stumble” button to be randomly

taken to highly regarded websites (ranked by other users via the plug-in). Likewise, the open source encyclopaedia Wikipedia ( www.wikipedia.org) offers Web surfers an opportunity to discover new and unexpected knowledge via a link to random articles on its main page.

Randomness in the hands of users. An emergent approach toward randomness is to allow users to interact directly with the randomness. In some desktop image-viewing applications, users can let the system decide random transition effects from picture to picture, or users can randomize particular albums, mixing up the order before viewing. A more sophisticated approach is seen in shuffle listening, whereby its application of randomness has publicly captured many people’s imagination. Shuffle listening is an alternative listening mode

[ 3] Hughes, R. The Shock of the Ne w. New York: Knopf, 1981.

[ 4] Pritchett, J. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[ 5] Drew, E. and M. Haahr. “Lessness: Randomness, Consciousness and Meaning.” 4th International CAiiA-STAR Research Conference ‘Consciousness Reframed,’ 2002.

May + June 2008