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Cage (
1968
), whose comprehensive engagement with chance, randomness and in-
determinacy informed the work of countless members of the avant-garde (Pritchett
1993
).
La Monte Young, a student of Cage's, was a key part of the early Fluxus move-
ment. “An Anthology of Chance Operations” (Young
1963
) is perhaps the paradig-
matic text, collecting numerous instructional scores and “open form” pieces: those
which leave significant constitutive elements open to choices made by the performer.
In doing so, certain formal structures are imposed—some very loose, some very
precise—which can act as catalysts or frameworks for artistic innovation.
The improvised painting of the Cobra group drew up a manifesto describing the
process of “finding” a painting through its production, seeking an art which is “spon-
taneously directed by its own intuition” (Smith and Dean
1997
, p. 108). Later, the
American abstract expressionists adopted practices such as action painting, aleatoric
and combinatorial techniques, thereby surrendering unmediated authorship of their
works (Smith and Dean
1997
, p. 109).
A broader approach is taken by Eno and Schmidt's
Oblique Strategies
cards (Eno
and Schmidt
1975
), which indirectly suggest escape routes from creative deadlock
via koan-like prompts. Similarly, sets of lateral, discipline-agnostic “heuristics” are
collected in the works of Pólya (
1971
) and de Bono (
1992
). A heuristic can be
thought of as a problem-solving rule of thumb; its literal translation, as Pólya notes,
means “serving to discover” (Pólya
1971
, p. 113). Rather than offering a concrete,
logically rigorous method, heuristics provide imprecise but plausible ways to tackle
a problem. In this case, they suggest formal approaches, in the form of rhetorical
questions such as “Have you seen it before?” (p. 110).
A markedly different tack was taken by the Oulipo movement, whose exercises
in constraint offer new creative routes to writers—paradoxically, through
restrict-
ing
the parameters of their production (Matthews and Brotchie
2005
). Similar con-
straints were present in the theatre of ancient Japan, whose ritualistic practices
subscribed to a well-defined set of norms (Ortolani
1990
). Submitting to external
demands can be seen as another form of delegating artistic decisions, trading the
openness of a blank slate for a more focused problem domain.
7.2.1 Computational Strategies and Algorithmic Aides
Historically, the potential for deploying computational technology in a creative con-
text did not escape even the earliest computer scientists. Alan Turing's fascina-
tion with such ideas lead to the establishment of the field of artificial intelligence
(Hodges
1985
). Partly due to the limited success of artificial intelligence in devel-
oping fully autonomous computational systems, and partly because of the increased
access to computing tools by artists and designers, experiments with creative part-
nerships between artists and computing systems began to flourish.
Early experiments in computer-aided composition are successively described by
Hiller (
1968
), Chadabe (
1984
) and Ames (
1987
), with early experiments building on
