Aleatory
Aleatory (or aleatoric) means "pertaining to luck",
and derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling dice. Aleatoric
art is that which exploits the principle of randomness.
One of the most ambitious aleatory projects in poetry is Raymond
Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand
Billion Poems).
John Cage was a very important name in aleatoric music. At the
premiere of his most famous work, 4' 33", the famous virtuoso
pianist David Tudor sat at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three
seconds and the reactions of the audience (whispering, coughs, laughs
...) formed the music.
In film-making, there are several avant-garde
examples; Fred Camper's SN (1984; first screening 2002) uses coin-flipping
to determine which three of 18 possible reels to screen and what
order they should go in (4896 permutations). Barry Salt, now better
known as a film scholar, is known to have made a film six reels
long which takes the word aleatory quite literally by including
a customized die for the projectionist to roll to determine the
reel order (720 permutations).
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