automatism

Performance of actions without awareness or conscious intent. It is seen in sleep-walking and in some (relatively rare) psychotic states.

automatism

In the arts, an act of creation which either allows chance to play a major role or which draws on the unconscious mind through free association, states of trance, or dreams. Automatism was fundamental to surrealism, whose practitioners experimented with automatic writing and automatic drawing, producing streams of words or doodles from the unconscious. It has been taken up by other abstract painters, such as the Canadian Automatistes, a group working in Montréal in the 1940s, and the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.