suggests various ways of screaming, while Christian You don’t know what Wolff’s “Stones” encourages players to “draw sounds out of stones” and ends with the request: “Do not you’ll get, and sometimes ^{break anything.}” Text-based instructions for making drawings or ^{you’ll get nothing much,} music are cool, but what about instructions for but giving up a little ^{making instructions? Larry Polansky’s Four Voice} Canon #13 (“DIY Canon”) is just that, a kind of control can be a powerful second-order music-making system. From Polansky’s _description: creative technique.

The four-voice canons are a set of pieces I have been working on since around 1976. #13 (“DIY Canon”) is intended as a general template for making new four-voice canons: a kind of meta-canon. This “score” (#13) describes the ideas behind the previous canons (permutation lists, mensuration canons, heterophony), and suggests ideas for future ones. It is a how-to manual, a technical description, and an invitational “ cookbook” for performers and composers to make their own pieces.

Photography by Suzanne Sarraf © 2004 National Gallery of Art, Washington (top), and Kate Hartman (bottom)

Sometimes, rather than defining a new algorithm and using it to generate materials, artists work with data or artifacts that are the result of some pre-existing process. Rachel Beth Egenhoefer recorded the moves in a game of Chutes and Ladders and then used bubble gum, lollipops, and string to turn the game play into sculpture. I once saw a very beautiful, and seemingly abstract, geometric sculpture/ painting by Candy Jernigan: a board covered with small, colorful plastic caps arranged in clumps with a grid in the center. On closer inspection I discovered the caps were from crack vials that Jernigan had found during walks in her neighborhood. The grid was a map of the surrounding blocks, and the caps were placed on the board according to where they were found.

Often the goal isn’t to make a thing at all, but to have an experience or create an interesting situation. At “psychogeography” events like the recent Conflux Festival in Brooklyn, N. Y., participants often use games or systems to explore unfamiliar parts of a city or find new ways of appreciating familiar ones. Mary Flanagan introduced Mapscotch, a combination of hopscotch and mapmaking used to explore social issues in public spaces. And Christian Croft and Kate Hartman introduced the Energy Harvesting Dérive, a pair of Heelys roller sneakers with a wheel-driven generator and two light-up arrows that generate random turning instructions. Sneakers for getting lost!

Being creative is hard work, and it’s easy to fall into a routine or rely too much on ideas and techniques that you’re comfortable with. If you feel yourself coasting, why not dream up a game or system of some sort and give yourself over to it? You might end up someplace unexpected and marvelous. Or horrible, but in that case it’s not my fault. Why can’t you just draw pretty pictures like a normal person?

Assistant executing Sol Le Witt’s Wall Drawing #65 (top), on a wall in the National Gallery of Art’s concourse galleries. In Energy Harvesting Dérive (bottom), all electronic components are housed in the tongue of the sneaker. The arrows on the toe light up to direct you where to go.

Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher involved in a number of art/community groups including Dorkbot, ArtBots, Organizm, and Music-dsp.

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