Effective chance in art is never blind — it is planned, constrained, and then surprising within those constraints

Gerhard Richter’s formulation captures the productive tension in chance-based practice: ‘Above all, it’s never a blind chance. It’s a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising.’ The artist designs a space of outcomes — choosing which parameters are free, their ranges, and the process that selects among them — then accepts whatever falls within that space. The constraint makes the surprise meaningful; blind randomness without design has no aesthetic traction. This applies directly to creative coding: random() within a well-designed parameter space is an authorial act; random() thrown everywhere is noise. The principle distinguishes purposeful generative art from procedural wallpaper.

Examples

Richter used squeegee strokes of paint over photo-realistic layers: the squeegee direction was partially free, but canvas size, color palette, and underpainting were fully controlled. Reas similarly bounded every random variable in Chronograph.

Assessment

Take an existing generative sketch and identify one ‘blind’ random call (uncontrolled range). Replace it with a ‘planned’ random call (bounded range with rationale). Describe what changed aesthetically.