The use of mechanisms or technologies of chance has been a recurring feature of 20th century avant-garde practice. The Dadaists created poems and paintings out of chance juxtaposition of newspaper cutouts (Tristan Tzara) or ripped pieces of paper (Hans Arp). André Breton developed a notion of 'objective chance' as part of a practise of psychogeographic exploration, while Surrealist painters like Max Ernst and Wolfgang Paalen developed the aleatory painting techniques of frottage, grattage, decalcomania and fumage. Marcel Duchamp and John Cage applied parallel techniques to musical composition.

As philosophers like Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze have recognized, this interest in the relation between artistic creativity and chance can be traced back to Stephane Mallarmé, for whom the idea of chance became an important theme in works like Igitur and Un Coup du Dés. For Badiou and Deleuze the question of the nature of chance becomes part of the central problem of the one and the many: is the chance occurrence of a truth-generating event (in art, politics, love, etc.) determined by an underlying algorithmic One, or is it rather 'by chance that a particular chance happens' so that chance is essentially plural?

But the interest of so many avant-garde artists in chance operations cannot wholly be explained by these metaphysical concerns ('not wholly' as the Surrealists' interest in 'objective chance', or John Cage's interest in the I Ching, clearly have metaphysical components). Peter Bürger suggests that this widespread interest in chance stems partly from the effort of various avant-gardistes to break away from traditional individualist patterns of artistic production. Like the cooperative art practices developed in, e.g. surrealist games, the use of chance mechanisms in art to some extent takes the creative process out of the hands of the traditional individual 'artistic genius' or bourgeois subject (which is precisely why such techniques raise strong opposition among those with more traditional perspectives on art).

But this negative motivation (destroy traditional patterns of individual subjectivity) should I think be understood in conjunction with a more positive one: the creation of new patterns of hybrid or cyborg subjectivity. Something approaching this idea is articulated on the website of MAMA (the Movement of Aleatory Modern Artists) as follows:

By learning to value and preserve that which we can never own, to respond and yield to that which we can never predict and to respect and trust that which we can never control, the aleatoric artist inherits the divine principle of acceptance, the creative process becomes a cooperative collaboration with the forces that govern the universe, and thus the aleatoric artist transcends the limitations of the mind and body to reach artistic plateaus previously unattainable.

Here we have the classic avant-garde ideas of collaboration, and the relinquishing of individual creative control, but conceptualised as an augmentation rather than dissolution of individual creative process, as traditionally understood.

In a similar way, the Augmented Imagination Project can be seen as an augmentation, rather than dissolution of traditional processes of poetic composition, one which enables the cyborg poet to reach previously unattainable juxtapositions of words and concepts. Whether this should be understood as a 'collaboration with the forces that govern the universe', or merely with an algorithm itself produced by a concatenation of chance events, is a question we can leave to the metaphysicians.