Automotism: Automatic Techniques used to exploit the device of CHANCE. A technique used by the Surrealists as a BEGINNING to stimulate and encourage the spontaneity of utterance or image-making.

Stream of Consciousness: The ability to freely receive utterences, phrases as they come to mind. To rid oneself of pre-determined linear organization of thought. To express oneself through the innate order of the mind. Usually non-sequential, seemingly random, or associative ideas and memories surface and are believed to be the natural state of the mind.

Automatic Writing: With pen and paper, in a receptive state of mind begin writing. Continue writing without thinking about what is appearing beneath your pen. Write as fast as you can. If the flow stops, begin again by writing letters of the alphabet until words again form. This technique can alternatively been done at a keyboard without any pauses, backspaces or correction techniques. Although this may be inhibiting if one's typing is slower than hand-writing. Crucial to automatic writing is the unpremeditated, free-assocation, moving from subject to subject.

Chance Operations: Any methodology for generating random sequences, such as dice, flipping through a dictionary and randomly pointing, counting patterns of cars driving through an intersection. While automatic systems depend on receptive and open states of mind in order to generate associative links, Chance Operations depends more on methodology, or is more often mechanical, than automatic systems.