Aleatoricism

Aleatoricism is the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially the creation of art or media. The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice. It should not be confused with either improvisation or indeterminacy.

Literature

Bryan Stanley Johnson (1933–1973) wrote an experimental novel The Unfortunates (1969), which was published in separate sections, consisting of a "first" and a "last" section, with the sections in between allowed to be shuffled randomly by a reader. This was an attempt to reproduce the randomness of personal memory. The overall narrative is about a sports journalist travelling to a city, to cover a football game, and recalling events and people from years earlier when he had lived in the city.

Poems have been written and published so that each successive line can be chosen randomly from a given set of lines. This process for generating a random poem is similar to the novelty picture books for children where each page is sliced, allowing the book to be opened to display different slices from different pages. For example, the top slice may show the head of a crocodile, the middle slice may show the body of an elephant, and the lowest slice may show the tail of a fish. The resulting "crazy animal" looks like a fish-tailed fat-bodied crocodile.