I often use random numbers in my work. I love them. I am totally addicted to them. Many other artists, both past and present, are too. There is an energy in them, life, beauty, opportunity. I have often thought about what a world would be like without them. In a recent generative art project that heavily depended on random numbers, I made an alternate version. Here every single chance operation resulted in NULL, which is like "no answer". Now when the program is run, each and every time this single image is the result. For instance, the part that pulls words randomly from a dictionary, always gets the first adjective (.22-caliber) and the first noun ('hood) because these happened to be the first words (special characters like . and ' come before alphabet characters). And the part that randomly sets color, always chooses 0 (black). And the part that plots coordinates always plots to 0. Well you get the picture...

So now with the chance operations taken away, we have a totally different piece of art, albeit one somewhat devoid of life. It reminds me of how I feel looking deep into the infinite black center of a mandelbrot set fractal. It is a dark and scary place.

Here is output from the same exact code, but with the happy random numbers: