In 1920, the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara published a set of instructions for making a Dadaist poem. The method was simple: take a newspaper article, cut out each word with scissors, put the words in a bag, shake gently, and pull them out one at a time, copying each word in the order it appears. The result is your poem. Tzara's instructions were partly a provocation — Dada was a movement built on mocking the pretensions of high art — but they were also a genuine technique, one that would echo through twentieth-century creative practice in ways he probably didn't anticipate.
The cut-up technique resurfaced most famously in the 1950s and 1960s through William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who applied it to prose rather than poetry. Burroughs would take pages of his own writing, slice them into strips, rearrange them randomly, and use the juxtapositions as raw material for new work. He didn't publish the random output directly — the method was generative, not final. The randomness produced unexpected collisions of image and language that his conscious mind would never have assembled, and he then shaped those collisions into finished prose through editing and revision. The randomness wasn't a replacement for craft. It was an input to craft, a way of accessing territory that deliberate composition couldn't reach.
Music has an even longer history with controlled randomness, often called aleatoric or chance music. Mozart is credited with a musical dice game — the Musikalisches Würfelspiel — in which the composer wrote multiple two-measure musical phrases for each position in a minuet, and the performer rolled dice to determine which phrase to play at each point. The result was a different composition each time, all of them harmonically coherent because Mozart had constrained each option to work within the overall structure. The randomness operated within boundaries that guaranteed a musically valid result, which is a principle that would reappear two centuries later in generative music and procedural audio.
John Cage pushed the concept further in the 1950s with his use of the I Ching — the ancient Chinese divination text — to determine compositional decisions. For his piece "Music of Changes," Cage used coin tosses interpreted through the I Ching to select pitches, durations, dynamics, and tempos. The result was music that sounded unlike anything composed by deliberate choice, which was exactly the point. Cage was interested in removing the composer's ego and taste from the creative equation, letting sound exist on its own terms without being shaped by preference or habit. Whether you find the results beautiful or unbearable is almost beside the point — the method opened a door that subsequent generations of composers, sound artists, and electronic musicians walked through.
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt formalized a lighter version of this approach in 1975 with their Oblique Strategies cards — a deck of roughly one hundred cards, each bearing a cryptic instruction like "Honor thy error as a hidden intention" or "What would your closest friend do?" or "Use an unacceptable color." When stuck in a creative session, a musician or artist would draw a card and apply whatever it said, using the random instruction as a constraint to break through the impasse. Eno used the cards extensively during the recording of David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and in his own ambient work. The cards don't generate art. They redirect the artist's attention to a place it wouldn't have gone voluntarily, and whatever emerges from that redirection is the material to work with.
The common thread across all of these practices — from Tzara's bag of words to Eno's cards to Mozart's dice — is that randomness serves as an antidote to habit. Every artist, no matter how talented, has default patterns: familiar chord progressions, preferred color palettes, habitual sentence structures, comfortable subject matter. These patterns are the signature of a mature creative voice, but they're also a cage. The same instincts that make your work recognizable also make it predictable, and the longer you work, the deeper the grooves become. Randomness interrupts the grooves. It forces your brain to respond to something it didn't expect, which recruits different cognitive resources than the ones you use when following a familiar path.
You don't need to be a professional artist to use this principle. A spinning wheel loaded with creative constraints — mediums, subjects, color limitations, time limits — can break a hobbyist out of a creative block the same way Oblique Strategies broke Eno out of a studio impasse. The mechanism is identical: an external, unchosen constraint that redirects attention from "what do I want to make?" (a question that invites self-censorship and overthinking) to "what can I make with this?" (a question that invites problem-solving and play). The first question is about identity. The second is about craft. And craft, more often than not, is where the interesting work happens.