I Ching, Art, and Generative Creativity

Decode a cast hexagram by identifying its component trigrams, line positions, changing lines, and resulting hexagram.

Calculate and compare line-value probabilities for the three-coin method and one explicitly specified reconstruction of the yarrow-stalk method, noting how methodological assumptions affect the frequency of changing lines.

Perform and document a consultation while separating the question, casting procedure, consulted textual passages, and interpretive decisions.

Analyze how change, timing, line position, correspondence, and yin-yang polarity jointly shape the interpretation of a selected passage from the Ten Wings or a later Yijing commentary.

Compare how Wang Bi, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi interpret a single hexagram without treating their historically distinct approaches as one tradition.

Contrast Yijing accounts of transformation with selected passages from the Daodejing and Zhuangzi while distinguishing historically grounded relationships from later comparative or speculative synthesis.

Trace the distinct roles of early Jesuit encounters, Legge, Wilhelm/Baynes, and Jung in Western transmission, then identify the particular edition and mediating context available to one Western artist or intellectual.

Compare one hexagram across Legge, Wilhelm/Baynes, Lynn, and Shaughnessy, first identifying the textual or commentarial object each presents and then analyzing consequential philological and philosophical choices.

Apply a concept from Benjamin, Berman, or Venuti to explain how translation changes the creative possibilities of a Yijing passage.

Critically assess one modern reception—such as a Jungian, esoteric, New Age, commercial, or feminist reinterpretation—for its historical claims, Orientalist framing, cultural appropriation, and productive interpretive transformations.

Analyze how qi, emptiness, movement, rhythm, brushwork, and natural process function in one work of Chinese painting or calligraphy using historically grounded sources.

Evaluate a claim in Mai-mai Sze’s The Tao of Painting by comparing it with a Chinese primary source and modern art-historical scholarship.

Translate one hexagram into six explicit artistic rules, prototype the same rule set in two different media, and record where symbolic interpretation entered each transformation.

Compare Barthes’s critique of authorial authority with Foucault’s concept of the author-function.

Use Eco’s open-work theory and Danto’s account of artistic interpretation to distinguish openness of realization from interpretation-dependent artistic meaning in a work partly determined by an external system.

Use Gell’s art-nexus model, while identifying its limitations, to map agency among artist, oracle, translator, procedure, performer, artwork, and audience and to specify which decisions each participant retains or relinquishes.

Distinguish chance, statistical randomness, accident, indeterminacy, automatism, and divination by their mechanisms and artistic functions.

Reconstruct the documented procedure of a Dada, Surrealist, or Duchampian chance-based work and separate historical evidence from later interpretation.

Design a non-divinatory chance procedure and compare its results with those of a Yijing-derived artistic constraint.

Establish what can be documented about Cage’s encounter with the I Ching using his writings, scores, interviews, archives, and critical scholarship.

Reconstruct how Music of Changes uses charts and I Ching-derived chance operations to determine specified compositional parameters.

Distinguish chance in composition from indeterminacy in performance by comparing selected scores and specifying what the composer, notation, performer, and ambient sound determine.

Create a short Cage-inspired sound composition and audit the roles of rule design, chance outcome, interpretation, and performance.

Reconstruct a documented chance procedure used in Suite by Chance or another Cunningham choreography.

Analyze how RainForest, Variations V, or a Cage–Cunningham collaboration redistributes agency among movement, sound, design, technology, and performers.

Create a short chance-derived choreography and compare its control structure with Cage’s compositional procedures.

Evaluate evidence and scholarly disagreement about how Philip K. Dick used the I Ching while composing The Man in the High Castle.

Close-read a character’s consultation of the I Ching to explain its narrative, epistemological, and alternate-historical functions.

Analyze the relation among Dick, the oracle, fictional consultations, and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy to formulate a precise model of recursive authorship.

Write a short alternate-world narrative using logged I Ching consultations for major decisions, including documented acceptance, reinterpretation, or rejection of each result.

Reconstruct the operative constraint in a work by Queneau, Perec, or Calvino and explain how it structures the work’s field of possibilities.

Compare an Oulipian designed constraint with an I Ching consultation in terms of rule selection, symbolic interpretation, combinatorics, and relinquished choice.

Evaluate an I Ching-based writing method associated with Sarah Jane Sloane, Jessica Morrell, or another practitioner for artistic rigor, evidentiary claims, and commercial framing.

Build and test an I Ching-based writing generator against an Oulipian or random-prompt version using the same creative task.

Construct a taxonomy distinguishing deterministic algorithms, stochastic processes, procedural generation, generative systems, interactive systems, and autonomous systems, including the roles of feedback and emergence in systems and cybernetic art.

Reconstruct Vera Molnár’s working process in a selected series using her writings, interviews, programs, or archival evidence, distinguishing documented procedures from retrospective interpretation.

Implement a hexagram generator in Python or JavaScript that can reproduce specified coin and yarrow-stalk probability distributions.

Create a computational artwork by mapping hexagram features to visual, textual, musical, or movement parameters, then identify what the mapping adds beyond randomness.

Evaluate Harold Cohen’s AARON using criteria for computational creativity drawn from Boden, Colton, or Galanter, and distinguish its rule-based architecture from contemporary learned generative models.

Diagram a contemporary generative-AI workflow from dataset curation and training through prompt-conditioned inference, stochastic sampling, selection, and editing, identifying where human control and technical uncertainty enter.

Evaluate authorship, dataset provenance, labor, copyright, originality, and selection in one documented contemporary AI-art case.

Execute a controlled micro-studio experiment that generates the same creative motif through personal intention, I Ching consultation, random numbers, formal constraint, algorithmic code, and generative AI.

Analyze the six experimental outputs to determine how generation, selection, interpretation, and control shift across systems, relating the findings to Cage, Cunningham, Dick, Oulipo, and algorithmic art while identifying where the analogies fail.

Prototype and critically defend an original I Ching creative system by documenting its artistic objective, rules, probability structure, retained and relinquished decisions, interpretive stages, iterations and outputs, agency distribution, scholarly basis, and relationship to the historical systems studied in the course.