I want to compile a list of art works that used chance operations and/or randomness in their creation. I am keen to incorporate pre-20th century, non-Western works, and lots of works by female artists, but anything you can think of will be super helpful. Chance operations doesn't necessarily mean random, for instance, some Oulipo stuff fits. Like Georges Perec using the knight's move in chess to structure 'Life a Users Manual'. And chance doesn't have to mean the generation of a pattern or structure, for instance, Yoko Ono's 'Cut Piece' created the opportunity for chance events to take place that were hugely influential on how the work played out.

Works by John Cage, Alison Knowles, Stan Brakhage, Yoko Ono, Robert Filliou, Brian Eno, Burroughs/Gysin, Ewa Partum, Simone Forti, Nam June Paik, Cildo Meireles, Hans Haacke, Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Hutchinson, Daniel Temkin and others come to mind, as well as tonnes of Dada, Fluxus and computer generated work.

As I say, I am keen to move outside well known 'canonical' stuff, but really influential pre-20th century works would be particularly useful to know about. Also, any very early computer stuff. Thanks in advance!

Alongside the Dadaists in the early twentieth century, the German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a style he called “Merz” (detached from the end of “Kommerz,” German for “commerce,” to create a new and useful scrap). As quoted in “The Collages of Kurt Schwitters,” by Dorothea Dietrich, Schwitters said, What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. “Merzbau” was the name of Schwitter’s Hanover apartment—his repository for fragments, and a fantastic cove of hard angles and gentle curves. (This video shows a reconstruction of the Merzbau presented last year at the Berkeley Art Museum. You’d name a band after it, too.) A different Schwitters quote helps explain Akita’s music, which he sometimes generates using only the equipment that amplifies instruments, not the instruments. Schwitters said, “In the war [at the machine factory at Wülfen]

Critical Play by MARY FLANAGAN

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Description: For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture.

Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of "playing house" include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims; her discussion of language play includes puns, palindromes, Yoko Ono's Instruction Paintings, and Jenny Holzer's messages in LED. Flanagan also looks at artists' alternative computer-based games, examining projects from Persuasive Games and Gonazalo Frasca and other games created through the use of interventionist strategies in the design process. And she explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—among them Darfur, worldwide poverty, and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design.

Arguing that this kind of conscious practice—which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium—can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

• Reader: Daniel Rourke

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Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German artist. He worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.

After studying art at the Dresden Academy alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz, (although Schwitters seems to have been unaware of their work, Schwitters returned to Hannover and started his artistic career as a post-impressionist. As the First World War progressed, however, his work became darker, gradually developing a distinctive expressionist tone.

Expressionism was a predominantly German artistic movement best exemplified by Die Brücke, and by the paintings of Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner in particular. In 1918, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany's economic, political and military collapse at the end of the First World War.

"In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready.... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been".