Chance, Poetry and Computational Art: The Visual Theogonies

This text discusses images that are part of my series “Visual Theogonies” (2014), which arose out of a playful game with the poem “Theogony: The origin of the gods”, by the Greek poet Hesiod. Chance is a concept that divides opinions in the field of computational art and has been a recurrent subject in the field of computer sciences as well. My stand in this text is not to refute either side , but rather to state that chance is a key component of my practice as an artist. To demonstrate the action of chance applied in the production of programs related to computational art in a context of dialogue with poetry, I present two visual theogonies generated by software that I developed in Ruby language. This software produces images that do not have ex-ternal indexes, in other words, these images are fruit of the pure manipulation by chance of a given set of data inside the computer’s memory.