In the American Masters PBS documentary on John Cage
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/johncage
(This was previously free on Youtube, but now you must rent it for $2 to complete this assignment), there is a
segment where John Cage is playing Chess with Marcel Duchamp’s
widow, Teeny, and they are creating a film about the game using
chance operations. What are chance operations and how does Cage
use them in general to make music? How is he using chance
operations to make a film about the chess game? Finally, how can
chance operations be used generally to make a work of art in any
medium?
2) The excerpt from Rudy Rucker’s “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the
Soul” discusses the notion that we could view any process in the real
world as a computation, with inputs and outputs. Rucker discusses
Wolfram’s 4 classes of computation in the chapter excerpt. Give one
example of a class 1 or class 2 computation that you can think of in
the real world in the real world (not one of Rucker’s examples).
Additionally, give an example a class 3 or class 4 computation. What is
an example of a computation in the world that is feasible but
unpredictable?
