Two Years of Living Randomly | Max Hawkins | TEDxVienna

For two years Max let a randomized computer program determine the course of his life. Everything from what he ate and the music he played to the city where he lived was determined by the whim of the computer. The randomizer sent him everywhere from a shopping mall in Japan to a goat farm in rural Slovenia. He tells the story of his randomly generated life: how he stumbled upon the concept of chance, why it became an obsession, and how he discovered that refusing to choose can be a radical act. Max Hawkins is an artist and computer scientist working at the boundary between computation and culture. His projects deal with information, chance, automation, and atypical forms of communication. He is a graduate of the Computer Science & Art program at Carnegie Mellon University and an alumnus of Google’s Data Arts Team. Since 2015 he has been nomadic, traveling the world based on the output of a random number generator. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at