Random War

Random War is one of the earliest works of generative, conceptual and simulation art. Instead of asking the computer to produce a geometric pattern, Charles Csuri and James Shaffer constructed a miniature social system: software positioned two armies, assigned identities and ranks, determined casualties and survivors, and calculated the results of an imaginary battle.

The work began with Csuri’s drawing of a single toy soldier. After the figure was encoded as computer data, a pseudorandom-number generator multiplied and transformed it across the battlefield. Some soldiers stand and aim; others bend, fall or lie horizontally as casualties.

This use of recognizable figures was itself a breakthrough. Early computer graphics consisted mostly of abstract mathematical structures or engineering visualizations. Csuri instead brought the human figure, already central to his work as a painter, into an algorithmic process. The soldiers remain immediately legible, but their positions, relationships and implied fates have been delegated to code.

The imagery was also personal. Csuri served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and received a Bronze Star for heroism. In Random War, the arbitrary loss he witnessed is expressed as a computational structure. The original program used the names of real people, including public figures and Csuri’s acquaintances, making the machine’s apparently impartial decisions disturbingly specific. As his daughter Caroline Csuri explained in a February 6, 2023 interview in Right Click Save, the work also responded ironically to contemporary fears that computers were dangerous or inhuman: Csuri allowed the computer to decide who would live, die, disappear or receive a medal.

Csuri developed Random War over more than a year, producing numerous plotter variants, many monochromatic, with differing numbers and arrangements of soldiers, before arriving at this red-and-black composition, the work’s most fully resolved and mature presentation for the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968.

The Motif Editions lithograph was published for the exhibition. It is not a later reconstruction but a period multiple through which Csuri’s work reached an international audience at the moment computer art was first entering public consciousness.