Charles Csuri — Random War

1967

Artists: Charles Csuri · Year: 1967 · Medium: Computer-generated print — algorithmic simulation of battlefield casualties · Substrate: IBM 7094 mainframe; Calcomp plotter; FORTRAN program simulating random death on a battlefield grid · Place: Columbus, Ohio, USA · Institution: Ohio State University Charles Csuri's Random War, made in 1967 at Ohio State the same year as Hummingbird, is an unusually overt political piece of computer-generated art. The program simulates a battlefield on which hundreds of soldiers — two opposing armies, each soldier named — are subjected to random casualty events at algorithmically-generated intervals. The output, printed as a large plotter drawing, shows the survivors and the fallen with their names, the dead crossed out by a program that had no prejudice between the two sides. The piece was produced during the Vietnam War and is unambiguously about it. Random War is remarkable because it uses the same generative-algorithmic tools as Nees's Schotter or Molnár's Interruptions, but applied to a specifically political subject. The rhetorical effect is direct. The viewer looks at a list of names; half are crossed out; the crossings are random; a computer decided. The piece argues, without needing to state the argument, that the deaths of soldiers in wars are not earned or avoided through merit — they are algorithmically distributed, like gravel falling. This kind of political deployment of the generative-art vocabulary was rare in the first generation. The Stuttgart school's work was largely formal; the Bell Labs work was largely technical. Csuri's willingness to bring the generative-algorithmic method to a specifically political subject anticipates the later 1990s net-art work (Bunting, Sollfrank) that made such deployments its primary mode. Random War is held at Ohio State's ACCAD archive. Lore Csuri was a Korean War veteran — he had served in the US Army and seen combat. Random War was produced shortly after the Tet Offensive in early 1967 and was widely noted in the American press coverage of the Vietnam War. The piece's list of soldier names was drawn from a US Army directory; the casualties were randomized. Csuri spoke about the piece rarely in his later career but acknowledged it was the most politically direct work he had made. Sources • Ohio State University — ACCAD archive • Csuri, Charles — various interviews and retrospective essays • Wands, Bruce — Art of the Digital Age (Thames & Hudson, 2006)