Accidents by another name
“There are extreme cases where mathematical truth has no structure at all, where it’s maximally unknowable, where it’s completely accidental, where you have mathematical truths that are like coin tosses, they’re true by accident, they’re true for no reason.”
Gregory Chaitin
One of the overall aims of my work you could describe as trying to better understand the science of art. More specifically, I'm interested in the art of film and video editing. It may therefore not be surprising that, when searching for the keyword accident on my blog, two quotes are found which are tagged accordingly. One, of course, is cited at the beginning of this post. The second is a statement by Alan Berliner, from an interview featured in Gabriella Oldham's book First Cut 2:
"Accidents in filmmaking are often magic by another name, and good directors and good editors must be willing to change and adjust their thinking in response to them all the time."
You could call this connection in itself an accident, or perhaps something that was bound to happen according to probability, given the amount of posts revolving around randomness (currently 53), and posts about editing (currently 146) on this blog.
In some ways, I believe we can say that the history of our cultural and technological evolution is a history of analysing, formulating, and automating processes important to our daily lives. This is not just for the purpose of efficiency, but perhaps more so, to free ourselves up to new intellectual challenges. After all, we do not want to invent the wheel over and over again.
In this way we are creating models of the world. But we have to remain mindful of the fact, that more often than not, we can only ever describe selected aspects of the world. We necessarily include some factors into our models and thereby exclude others. If these models are well designed, then, they allow for planning and prediction of given phenomena (Holland 1998). But time and again we may have to accept that our models are missing important variables to go further, and sometimes our perception may simply rely a little too much on our interpretations of chance events.
One aspect of my work is to discuss the possibility of describing rules for editing, a grammar, or some form of notation. In case you are interested to learn a few details about my research, check out one of my previous blog posts. I admit, it's not the most thrilling read, but if you skim through it, you might find some details that interest you. More blog posts that discuss my work will be added in time.
Anyway, at this point we would have to say, nope. It can't be done. Film and video editing are not formulaic enough to describe a systematic practice. Walter Murch suggests that editing, much like music, may one day be described with some form of notation, but we are definitely not there yet.
By focusing on music videos I'm dealing with a format that is seen as inherently random by many people. One of the things I'm trying to find out, therefore, is what's "good" and what's "bad" randomness from an artistic or aesthetic point of view.
Chance in itself may be a phenomenon we ascribe to processes we simply cannot find sufficient laws and rules for. I briefly discussed this in a previous blog post, as well. In short, we could say that chance, or randomness, "is relative to the information and computing resources at our disposal", and that "even events that are fully determined by public information may be perceived as random events by an observer that lacks the relevant information and/or the ability to process it" (Goldreich 2008, 286).
Oded Goldreich therefore suggests that it doesn't matter so much if something is truly random or not, as long as we perceive it to be. Essentially, we don't actually know if "randomness" really exists as something beyond a description of our own perception and understanding.
When we try to systematically understand the world, no matter if from a scientific, mathematical, or artistic point of view, we mostly try to eliminate our notion of chance. The question is: Can we?