The practise of aleatory (from latin aleatorius “belonging to the player”, alea “dice, risk, chance”) as it exists in music, art and literature is understood as the deliberate use of non-systematic operations with a unpredictable, often random result.

Goal of the course is to enable students to use their own computers as a tool for the production of aleatoric text and language. The learned skills can not only be used for text, but can also be applied to the creation of acoustic or visual objects. To achieve this we will use the programming language Python to read texts from files or the web in an automated fashion (webscraping) and use these texts as the base for further processes.

Programming is an abstract topic and three days are not much to learn it. To utilize the time it students are recommended to look at the basics of the language beforehand on their own terms (there is a ton of tutorial texts and videos online). Questions will be answered via mail.

Required for participation is a laptop (operating system doesn’t matter, as long as it runs Python).

You can watch the three 2,5h lessons as a bbb recording here