The Surrealist technique that uses spontaneous thought or mark-making without conscious control is automatism.
Surrealist automatism aimed to bypass deliberate reasoning and let images, words, or movements emerge from the unconscious. André Breton described it as a way of expressing thought without the filtering effects of reason, morality, or aesthetic judgment. The method was influenced partly by experiments with hypnosis, dreams, and automatic writing.
Artists used automatism in several forms. Writers produced automatic texts, while visual artists made free-flowing lines, accidental forms, and improvised compositions. Joan Miró, André Masson, and Max Ernst are among the artists associated with approaches related to automatic creation, although their methods were not identical.
Automatism does not mean that every Surrealist artwork was made randomly or without later editing. Many artists selected, refined, and composed the results afterward. It is also different from Cubism, which analytically fragmented visible forms, and from Pointillism, which used systematic dots of color.