In his 1957 essay “Chance Imagery,” George Brecht proposed two definitions of chance; the first relied on the psychic unconscious, and the second depended on unpredictability in the process of enacting a work. The former is indebted to the concept of chance exploited by Surrealists and Dadaists of the early twentieth century. The latter is directly linked to Fluxus works and events, with chance disrupting traditional hierarchies of artistic production and authorial subjectivity. Instead, creative agency is commandeered by the audience, the environment, and the conditions of display of a given work. Because of this fluid nature, chance operations disintegrate the very idea of a static work of art and interrupt any attempts at indexical documentation. This understanding of chance is central to the experience of Paik’s Zen for Film: the changing occurrence of the artwork is provoked by the unpredictability of the accumulation of traces, random events in the environment, and the projecting mechanism, as well as the iterant character of the installation itself, including shifting relation to the space and the viewer. In other works presented here, unexpected events and conditions replace the respective initial durational, material, spatial, or instructive frameworks. In this, chance is central to other concepts. Silence uproots authorial determinism to favor unpredictability, trace can be read as a physical collection of chance-based operations, and boredom heightens one’s awareness of chance.

John Cage emphasized indeterminacy as the desired goal in the application of chance and proposed that “more essential than composing by means of chance operations…is composing in such a way that what one does is indeterminate of its performance” (Cage, 1957). —CA