As anyone who has wielded a camera knows, photography has a unique relationship to chance. It also represents a struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration with a mechanical process. Robin Kelsey reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography in order to create art for a modern world.

To many, chance and art are antagonistic terms. But a number of 20th century artists have turned this notion on its head by attempting to create artworks based on randomness. Among those, three in particular articulated a well-argued and thorough theory of the radical use of chance in art: André Breton (writer), John Cage (composer) and François Morellet (visual artist). The implications of such a move away from established aesthetics are far-reaching, as much in conceptual as in practical terms, as this book hopes to make clear. Of paramount importance in this coincidentia oppositorum is the suggested possibility of a correlation between the artistic use of chance and a system of thought itself organised around chance. Indeed placing randomness at the centre of one’s art may have deeper philosophical consequences than just on the aesthetical level.

"Museum of Chance is the first publication of Museum Bhavan, which is a collection of museums made by Dayanita Singh in New Delhi. The museums hoiuse old and new images made by the artist. Each wooden structure can be placed and opened in different ways, and holds around a hundred framed images, some on view, while others wait for their turn in the reserve collection, also kept inside the structures. As Singh keeps adding images to the museums, the museums themselves give birth to other museums. For example, the Museum of Embraces comes out of the Museum of Chance, and the Museum of Vitrines is contained within the Museum of Furniture. This publication is a mass produced artist book for the museum by the same name. Each image in the book is a cover image on one of the books."--Colophon.

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.

This book is about the collaborative work by four artists associated with the FLUXUS and Nouveau Réalisme movements.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Sept. 18, 2009-Jan. 4, 2010.

A personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research. This first book by the author of Zen and the Brain examines the role of chance in the creative process. James Austin tells a personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research; the conclusions he reaches shed light on the creative process in any field. Austin shows how, in his own investigations, unpredictable events shaped the outcome of his research and brought about novel results. He then goes beyond this story of serendipity to propose a new classification of the varieties of chance, drawing on his own research and examples from the history of science—including the famous accidents that led Fleming to the discovery of penicillin. Finally, he explores the nature of the creative process, considering not only the environmental and neurophysiological correlates of creativity but also the role of intuition in both scientific discoveries and spiritual quests. This updated MIT Press paperback edition includes a new introduction and recent material on medical research, creativity, and spirituality.