between chance and choice

• Chance operations in art emerged in the 1920 with the Dadaists. Duchamp a big fan of using chance possibilities to explore the production of new creative possibilities that challenged ideas of order and reason.

• John Cage used the I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes) to determine pathways for his work. Other artists incorporating chance, relinguishing a degree of control to determine outcomes in their practice, Merce Cunningham, Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly.

• The work below, 'Providence Diastic' 2008 by Clement Valla, references American poet Jackson Mac Lowe’s systematic, chance-based ”diastic" poetry. Mac Lowe would select a key phrase, then read the text until he found a word whose first letter matched the first letter of the key phrase. He would then keep reading until he found a word whose second letter was the same as the second letter in the key phrase, then a 
word whose third letter matched, and so on. Using the letters in ‘Providence,’ Valla created a diastic poem using words found on billboards and signs around the city. The resulting text is a chance based selection of found words from the city itself.

Tracey