Creativity Quote by Alva Noto

Coincidence is usually the thing artists are trained to deny. Alva Noto, a composer and visual artist whose work treats clicks, glitches, and clean grids like primary colors, flips that hierarchy: the “decision” we fetishize as authorship is framed as an after-effect of chance. The line reads almost like an affront to the romance of intention, especially in a culture that wants every creative move to be a signature and every life choice to be a coherent brand arc.

The repetition is the tell. “Every individual decision” and “every artistic decision” collapse into the same category, implying that art isn’t a sacred exception; it’s just another human attempt to impose narrative on noise. Coming from a practice steeped in minimalism and algorithmic process, the claim works less as nihilism than as method. When you build with systems - code, generative rules, strict parameters - you invite the unforeseen, then curate it. The “decision” becomes selection, not invention: a sensitivity to what emerges rather than a heroic act of will.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of the audience’s hunger for meaning. If decisions are coincidences, then interpretation becomes an active collaboration, not a decoding of the creator’s private intent. That fits Noto’s aesthetic: spare, clinical surfaces that nonetheless vibrate with emotional charge, precisely because they leave room for the listener’s projections. In a world optimized for control, the quote argues for a colder, braver truth: creativity is what happens when you stop pretending you’re fully in charge.