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Lots of folks enjoy discussing the notion of video games as art, and whether it’s even a considerable possibility. However, art critics (and most artists) agree that computer use and art are increasingly and essentially complimentary ideals.

I only say that to set up some exploration into the use of randomanty as a means of finding legitimate artistic inspiration - the central article of which is new to me, but (as it turns out) not really new at all.

A friend of mine shared with me his use of a Random Word Generation Device which does just as the name suggests, in two-word combinations of either adjective+noun or adverb+verb. Examples?

> > pterodactyloid Starr
> > immediate stilbite
> > unstalemated Knight
> > unjestingly lead up
> > pseudospiritually affiancing
> > dreamless Christiansburg
> > accumulatively lounge about
> > overmodest fatigue duty
> > superserviceably resoften
> > cinnamoned house of windsor

The writer who engineered this device admits that it uses a “large dictionary,” so it produces “a lot of weird ones.” But still, anybody interested in finding creative inspiration could be stimulated to portray the unstalemated Knight in the interest of creative exercise. But, in compromising for the inclusion of the phrase, or even in accounting for the spirit of it, is the artistic merit fractured? Does this device spook muses, or entice them to come near?

Right away, I thought of a great essay by Roger Scruton about Beauty and Desecration in which he repeatedly asserts that truth and beauty are one and the same:

“The culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized.

As I’ve said before, we often hear the word “random” to describe the bizarrely included, the strangely unannounced, or the plainly absurd. But the word “random” has a very specific meaning, and it’s such an important, powerful concept that I think it would be a big mistake for popular language to appropriate it unjustly. The reason that Ryan’s word generator works at all is its ability to explore the powerfully thin proximity between beauty and nonsense inherent to randomization. A human being would have difficulty generating truly aseptic meaninglessness. To create a confining creative circumstance - one he happens to find productive - Ryan uses a machine to spar against.

For the efficient artist, inspiration is sweetest at its most sour. Tell Ryan to write a story about kindness, and he’ll have a tough time, but ask him to tell you the tale of the ceramic watermelon, and he’ll have it by Monday. What’s more? It’ll be good.

But is finding beauty in the obscure a perverse act? Are we, as Scruton puts it, contributing to a culture of transgression which achieves nothing but the loss it revels in? Or, when the artist uses a machine to provide efficiently vanquishable adversity for the sake of refining his skills, is it his ability to find truth even in nonsense that sees him through?

References:

Scruton’s Essay
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_beauty.html

Adjective+Noun generator from (ahem) “creativityforyou”
http://creativityforyou.com/combomaker.html
*=found after only light digging. There are thousands out there.

Thinking about our shared history in decade-centric, categorical tropes is faulty and difficult, but this extract from the New Yorker (April, 2009) is worth revisiting in the context of that question: What were these last ten years about, and how will they be remembered, by us?

“In the abstract, every new generation is pretty much like the one that came before it: struggling Oedipally with its forebears, embracing the Zeitgeist, and otherwise reactivating stock patterns, meanwhile being fawned upon by marketers. If there is anything unique about today’s young, it may be a precocious alertness to how such rhetorical typecasting and economic targeting work. This generation even usurps the process, by innumerable online means. Gone are the days, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when deconstruction-smitten academics and artists toiled to share their discovery that media and institutions are—get ready—manipulative. Viscerally sophisticated young artists are more interested in playing with materials and contexts that are purely gratuitous, or, at least, too anarchic or too desultory to be marshalled for or against any commercial interest or political tendency. It’s a timely shift, given that, this year, sales of almost everything, very much including art, are down, and that, last year, theoretical politics were obliterated by the real thing. The only sorting system for artists that matters—according to individual quality and influence—will prevail, in time, over fashion. Not that there’s anything wrong with fashion. Novelty keeps us spry, and it cleans up after itself by being gone in a minute.”

Peter Schjeldahl, “Their Generation”
4/20/2009. The New Yorker

URL:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2009/04/20/090420craw_artworld_schjeldahl