DSI Lecture Series | The Deliberate History of Randomness: Determinism, Race, Trans Life, and the History of Random Number Generation with Whit Pow and Sheila Murphy

There is something deliberate about the history of randomness. Computers are often described as “deterministic”: every process that is performed by a computer is pre-determined, with often formulaic outcomes. “Determinism” is also a historically loaded word—one that has been paired with the term “biological” to justify eugenicist thought related to race, disability, and queer and transgender life. What might it mean, then, to place these meanings side-by-side, connecting the long history of ideological determinism in relationship to race, gender, and sexuality in the United States alongside the use of determinism in computer science and programming?

Using previously unseen video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s archives along with the 1978 glitch art piece Digital TV Dinner, I examine the randomized imagery and glitch art produced by the Bally Astrocade, a video game console and home computer whose software was developed in 1978 by trans programmer and game designer Jamie Faye Fenton. I trace this history of the random through computers, hardware random number generators like lava lamps and atmospheric noise from radio waves, the United States census, and the roots of random number generation in eugenicist thought in the United States.

Whit Pow (they/them) is an assistant professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Their work focuses on queer and transgender (trans) histories of games, computational media and electronic art. Their latest article, “How the Computer Taught Us to See,” will be published this fall in Camera Obscura by Duke University Press.