Aleatoric Art

I came across a book several years ago called “Why Cats Paint” in which the author attempted to justify the torture of his pets, which he dipped in paint causing them to struggle to wipe their paws onto canvases to which they were confined, by suggesting that there was a latent vestige of artistic inspiration in their furry little minds that needed to be unleashed. He actually claimed he was freeing their “mews” by providing them with a creative outlet. Thinking it a compliment to anthropomorphize an animal who is blissfully unburdened by the psychological dysfunction that defines our species, the author goes so far as to compare the haphazard besmirchments of his victims to works of the great masters. He further tried to deceive his readers by including what few photos he managed to take in which the animals showed no noticeable signs of distress. But I knew. The work his unwilling quadrupedal “artists” produced under duress told of their pain, even with the limitations of their painting technique, not to mention lack of awareness of what they were doing. I came away with a feeling of great sympathy for the exploited animals and contempt for the author.

Years later I discovered the exciting world of aleatoric art. The concept of incorporating the element of chance into the process of creating art opened my eyes to new possibilities beyond my wildest imagination, and even beyond the boundaries of my interest whatsoever. I thought about that book and had an epiphany. What the author was really doing was, in retrospect even more reprehensible than at first I’d thought. He was catipalizing, er capitalizing on helpless innocent felines for his own monetary gains, and in the process, giving aleatoric art a bad name.

I was at the Coney Island Boardwalk one afternoon when I came across a cart vendor who was making a modest living with a device that consisted of a spinning turntable upon which he attached paper plates. The customers could, for just a nickel, squeeze different colors of liquid tempera from plastic mustard bottles onto the spinning plate to produce original works of art that resembled random flower forms or starbursts due to the centrifugal force spreading the paint in all directions. They were quite beautiful and I had to try it for myself. After throwing an all out tantrum to get my mother to shell out the nickel I began squirting every color available onto the rotating canvas, ignoring the vendor’s warning that too many colors would not yield desirable effects, and, inexplicably, I ended up with a hideous brown soggy mess. And although my effort was an unmitigated failure it was my first experience as an aleatoric artist.

Around that same time in my life the first color TVs started appearing in the stores and I went with my father to pick one out. I remember seeing RGB static for the first time. I was astounded by those colors, colors that had never been seen before coming through a cathode ray tube in a random chaotic pattern. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and on some level inspired me immensely. I went home and tried to draw what I’d seen on paper with crayons and immediately discovered that it was impossible to produce the same effect of light shining through the back of a black screen (additive process) with pigments on a white sheet of paper (subtractive process). In my childish stupidity for years I believed in the existence of new colors outside the known spectrum that were as yet undiscovered and I tried to imagine them.

Aleatoric art with its ability to show us things we might never have imagined in a million years as traditional artists, evokes that kind of childlike wonder and awe. That naive yet blissfull ignorance that we try to retain for our children as long as possible by reinforcing their belief in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. But why perpetuate a lie to our children only to have them discover the charade and become that much more jaded and disillusioned. Why not be Santa Claus, but a more believable version? Why not leave a basket at the foot of their beds every morning, make them hunt for their eggs at breakfast time, instead of scrambling the damn things for them.

Art is a metaphor for life and aleatoric art is a metaphor for a more holistic, green, or globally conscious lifestyle that cooperates with our planet and it’s chaotic, and thus indestructible, balance. Aleatoria is an analogous model for peaceful co-existence and for an understanding and belief in the perfect equilibrium that has been achieved by evolution. In alignment with Eastern philosophy in which disaster and opportunity are synonymous the movement of aleatoric modern artists knows why cats paint: Because some idiot forced them to!

Note the similarity between the traditional Zen rock garden and the litter box and you will realize why cats don’t need to paint. They are masters of meditation and much can be learned by simply observing them. Dogs? Well that’s a different story.

by Ray Cabarga

Justinus Kerner- A signature illustrated with a Klecksographie 1879

Essay: Ever since Leonardo da Vinci urged artists to search for inspiration in the dirt on walls or the streaked patterns in stones, they have found that the accidental blot, the chance mark, or the naturally occurring stain can be a starting point for some extraordinary art… more

Boy with new balloon by Stoffell De Roover

Why make aleatoric art?

There are many reasons ranging from “oops, it was an accident.” to “because it wasn’t there.” But most artists agree that art mimics life. The Aleatoric artist simply takes that literally to conclude that if art mimics life, then the process of making art must mimic the process of making life. And if that is true, then art would come from a place that mimics the place from which life comes. So his next question is…

Where does life come from?

After fending off a flurry of solicitous advances by various supreme beings, divine creators, and holy deities, he finds the answer: Life comes from ooze. Fetid, festering primordial ooze. Residual sediment from the formation of our planet itself seething and bubbling with nitrogenous organic compounds, amino acids, and other prebiotic elements. And with the anxious tenacity of a starving young artist, it somehow finds a way to evolve. Perhaps sparked by something ejected from a passing comet, the spontaneous formation of complex polymers occurs and cells begin to divide and multiply. In a chain reaction, life takes shape, assumes a corporeal form, grows teeth, legs and other assorted appendages, until it has enough things sticking out of it that it can feel itself, and thus have self-awareness, self-consciousness… the essence of life.

Where does aleatoric art come from?

A process not dissimilar to that which produces life. The perfect mixture of elements sit dormant waiting for a spark. That is the point at which the aleatoric artist strikes and suddenly, a metamorphosis takes place. Once the transformation has been completed, he signs his name to it.

Sound simple? It’s not

The Aleatoric artist spends most of his time cultivating the perfect setting and conditions for this miracle to occur, and art is finicky. Too cold and the ooze remains dormant and eventually just smells bad. Too warm and it grows out of control and gets all over the carpet. Just look at it funny and it dies. And the aleatoric artist must never sleep because, the instant he closes his eyes, the precious pile of goo he’s been guarding will suddenly jump up and start wobbling around the room like a newly ambulatory infant, pulling down table cloths, knocking over lamps, and scaring the cat. Invariably the aleatoric hatchling must be subdued to keep it from destroying the house, and itself.

And that was the easy part

The exhausted aleatoric artist must now come up with an explanation for how he produced this masterpiece and what it symbolizes. This is where God is useful and he will invoke the name of any supreme being available in an attempt to give his art meaning and purpose.

Kahlil Gibran expressed it well in one of those little things he wrote, although he was talking about children. I just changed a few words. But basically he said, and I misquote:

“Your artworks are not your artworks.


They are the paintings and sculptures of art’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,


And though you offer them for sale,

Sometimes you can’t give them away.

You may give them your love but not your life,

For art has a life of its own.


You may choose the medium but not the colors,

For the colors look different after they’ve been mixed,

which you cannot predict, not even on a color chart.

You may strive to be like your art,

but seek not to make your art look like you.


For nobody cares what you looked like yesterday.

You are the loading dock from which your artworks,

as framed canvases, are shipped out.


The curator senses that the work is marketable,

and he pressures you with his deadlines,

that this exhibit may put him on the map.

Let your hard work in the curators hands make you money;


For even as he doubts that you’ll make him rich,

He loves that you keep trying.”

                    —Kahlil Gibran, (sort of).

So I pose now this question to you: Why make aleatoric art? Or more to the point, how do you stop it? After we tried burning it, washing it away, beating it, painting it black, waiting for it to rot, going out into the desert as far away as possible—We’ve even tried filling it with water until it explodes—We’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t stop it. Because, as Kahlil says, It’s not ours to stop.

Ray Cabarga http://raycabarga.com

It’s a matter of trust. When we look for something new to improve our lives, to enrich our scope of experience, to expand our awareness, how do we know what’s good? When the purpose of the thing we seek is to introduce us to the unknown, by what do we gauge its quality and how do we know whether the person selling it to us has our better interests in mind or we are being scammed? Usually we rely on reputable institutions, established authorities, or trusted friends to tell us when we can safely enjoy a thing previously unknown to us because without such a recommendation we run the risk of liking something bad. We risk ridicule from our peers and we fear being cast out of our social group.

The public school system has two main functions, education and socialization. The former is believed to be the primary function of an educational institution but one has only to look at the average American to see that our formative years were not spent devoted to the pursuit of higher learning. The average American retained very little of the academia fed to him in the classroom, and what he did learn he’s either forgotten or never uses in his daily life as a grocery clerk or assembly line technician.

What he has learned is that he and his ilk have a specific place in life. He’s learned that his purpose, his reason for being is to be a grocery clerk or assembly line technician. He’s learned that he is no different from anyone else around him and his place is among those like him. He can however experience more than what he is through the eyes of his heros, select individuals who had the vision and motivation to break away from the pack and discover something new.

An artist is a kind of hero in that he can show us things we never imagined, or at least use his skill to show us a new side of something we already knew. With the onset of desktop publishing came a deluge of band-wagoneers with the enthusiasm to do art but none of the study, training nor sensibilities to do it well. With so many of these self proclaimed artists filtering in to the workforce, filling the demand for art in advertising and media, our senses are bombarded with amateurish and uninspired art often presented side by side with quality work as well as a wide a range of fine art and nothing to differentiate them other than their aesthetic virtues, virtues which escape the unlearned eye whose peers are the producers of the shoddy work. Furthermore fine art is almost always subordinated by the well-funded commercial variety in terms of mass exposure which would increase it’s popularity

What we are left with is a culture that has no way of knowing the difference between pure genius and pure garbage. So it’s a matter of trust. We must trust an authority to inform us as to what we like, or should like, and when it comes right down to it even the most trusted authorities are influenced by mass appeal based on demographic studies. Even the most reputable expert is just one commercial flop away from being just another opinion and one with a bad public reputation at that.

So who do you trust? Is there any one source of reliable knowledge in a field that by definition is yet unknown? How can we guarantee that our discovery is worth discovering? When we look at a piece of art by an unknown artist, on what do we base our opinion of that art? We’ve already established that we ourselves are not qualified to judge, that we are biased by social pressures and influenced by our scope of experience which is dictated by commercial interests.

The answer is simply go back further, not to the authority figure who we’ve shown to be fallable, but further. First stop is the established rules of color harmony, symmetry and balance, contrasts and compliments. But those are the specific rules that every great innovator has deliberately broken in order to provide us with that shocking departure from the expected norm, with that clever, mischievous deviation from accepted standards, with that surprise slant on what we thought we had already seen long ago. so we must go even further back to find the answer to the question,”what is good?”

Yes the sun’s light splits into a perfect chromatic series of colors and the laws of perspective, refraction, shadow and light, symmetry and balance will always be the same when seen through our sensory apparatus. But when you look out into a dense fecund jungle or a starry sky you don’t see those laws being followed to the letter. What you see is a random chaos that seems to arbitrarily decide to order itself and create specific formations that repeat themselves with startling accuracy and consistency. You see the product of an artist called evolution, an artist called decay, an artist called spontaneous coalescence. And these artists are bound to certain rules just as a child in a third grade art class must color within the lines.

This is where aleatoric art comes in. The rules that dictate the formation of the universe through the hands of the natural processes of evolution, decay, etc. are the very same rules that play a part in the creation of aleatoric art. The aleatoric artist lets these rules govern or influence the outcome of his work. And from this ultimate authority one can find certainty in the trueness of art.

As one imposes ones will on chaos it begins an arc, starting out at one end as the conscious will to organize provides us with welcome recognizable structure. The imposition of structure on chaos remains desirable throughout the upward slope, but as we begin to recognize more and more the patterns and familiarity, while the novelty wears thin, the arc approaches its apex and begins to level off. Immediately the imposed will begins to have the opposite effect on the chaos diminishing its value an appeal analogously to the paving over of forests and the destruction of natural wilderness with man made cities and suburbs, until all the chaos is gone and the arc completes.

This arc, known hereafter as the aleatoric arc, is a model which the aleatoric artist must follow and observe closely in determining the ratio of chance to intention in his work. Art that remains near the bottom of the first upward slope of the arc might be un-cropped nature photography. While art that ends up at or near the bottom of the final downward slope of the arc would probably look somewhat like finger painting in mud.

by Ray Cabarga