Luke Murphy: The New Raw Unconscious

While many artists have employed aleatory elements in their work including ceramic effects, Chinese ink blot drawing and Cozens' blot technique, it has been in the 20th century that chance has become an overt aesthetic or anti-aesthetic strategy. At first with Duchamp, dada and Surrealism's psychic automatism and later with John Cage, chance and randomness have become part of the standard new tool box. But it is the use of random number generation that marks the dividing line between traditional art and digital work. Generative programs, sims, data visualization and other mimetic digital work represent the fountain head of the artist encountering the ability to simulate nature through computer generated random numbers. But to move further we need to examine what is the difference between computer generated random numbers, which are themselves a simulation and what it is to tap into the ultimate source of randomness. Concentrating on the clicks from a Geiger counter brings us into direct communion with the fabric of time and space. It is the sound of the raw material unconscious.