Slashdot Mirror
Computer Art For a CS Dept Office?
philgross writes "My university's Computer Science Department has just renovated its main office, and is looking for artwork for the walls. Do you have any recommendations about your favorite posters or images that address the algorithms, the history, and/or the aesthetics of Computer Science?"
M. C. Escher ... well, woodcuts are an odd market.
There's the famous well known M. C. Escher famous for placing strange loops in his work thus making his tessellations and peculiar drawings centered on curious near mathematical conundrums (Mobius Strips, infinite limits, undefined boundaries, etc). For the most part, I believe he did woodcuts so if you're thinking about originals
Fractal Art
There are several variants of this and you could buy some or create it yourself (not hard to find scripts that do this). It ranges from in your face to subtle. This is common and widely created.
Slashdot Story Art
A while back, there was a story on some humorous computer science-y art you could ask the original artist for permission to use.
Or you can just look at various collections for your own tastes.
My work here is dung.
M.C. Escher
Big sign that says FP?
Depending on how formal you want it to be. The TA area at GA. Tech is filled with comics like www.xkcd.com While many will not be appropriate items like the mapping of IP ranges would be excellent.
Why not just wallpaper in xkcd comics?
n/t
If your school just spent a lot of money making the building look nice, you might want to go with something a wee bit more classy than posters on the walls. Just sayin'.
To remind people that mistakes have consequences and to think through what they are doing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How about some nice, big fractal images?
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
A while back there was a post about people doing "mathematical" art, and I'd recommend looking at those people and contacting them to see if they're willing to send you prints. In particular, I know Jeff Ely does great stuff that way, usually involving newton's method for polynomial solving, and fancy other constructs using simple objects. I think it'd suit the general "geek" atmosphere you would need in a CS department.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
http://www.pascal-central.com/pascal-syntax.html or a picture of it here: http://pascal-central.com/images/pascalflow.jpg You need to fix it firmly to the wall since it carries some strong type.
...are fractal imaes and x-ray photos of CPUs.
BUT, you could also get some big-ass posters of Space Wars and a session of Adventure, perhaps Asteroids, Missile Command, Space Invaders and PacMan as well. A Commodore 64 bootscreen or an Amiga bouncing ball or Guru Meditation Error (bonus points for a LCD/Plasma screen with the blinking red box!) or a screenshot of a game of Rogue. Tell it like it is - don't get 'arty' about it. That's not what we're all about.
Dilbert everywhere. Let the students know what they can look forward to.
-- Dear God, please save me from your followers.
A few suggestions:
Fractals are ALWAYS cool. Especially the Mandelbrot set.
Maps of the internet are readily available, and if you can line several of them up they can be very educational.
Find and print out a high resolution map of the concepts in Alice in Wonderland. (extra credit, harder to find)
Have someone scan in the back of a circuit board, then blow it up to poster size. It just plain looks cool.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
You could take a very interesting approach to this and employ Piet which is a type of programming language that results in writing programs utilizing colors and blocks and traverses them as the program runs, resulting in some nice looking 'modern' art. The neat thing about this is you could open up a contest to your developers to come up with beautiful ways to write simple programs and procedures and then vote on the most beautiful ones. To me, something coded to be both beautiful and functional would be highly desirable. The fact that it would come from within your developers would probably add to the effect among your staff.
Plus, it'd be super cheap!
My work here is dung.
Robert Tinney did the covers for Byte Magazine in the late 70s/early 80s and is selling prints of some of them now.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
There's a lot of ray-traced images from the POV-Ray galleries which closely follow not only the mathematical basis from which computing as we know it was born, but have been beautified so even those who don't know the geeky underpinnings can appreciate them... preferrably before they learn them.
.POV file so you can render it at any resolution you see fit for whatever gargantuan dimensions you'll send to the printing office and make them cry. ;)
A lot of them have high quality prints available, and even some free (as in beer) ones will have the original
More Twoson than Cupertino
When I was in school, one of the labs had framed posters of the dies of various Intel processors. If I remember correctly, they were all older processors starting with 8088 and going up to maybe one of the 486 processors. I don't know where they got them or if they're still available, but they were awesome. It was especially cool to compare the posters and see how much the designs advanced between processor generations. Actually, if anyone knows where to buy posters like that, send me a link. I'd like to buy some for myself.
Well, a lot of XKCD comics will do it.
Especially that special version ones such as the map of the internet.
How about some nice Bill Gates pics?
http://www.contextfreeart.org
any number of options from http://despair.com/
I have Munch on my wall. Very relaxing and inspiring when you are behind schedule.
839*929
Porn, printed as ASCII art on a dot-matrix printer.
See the third item here, titled "I didn't ask..."
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I worked at DEC Spit Brook for a while... All the conference rooms there were themed on a person important to computing, for instance, the Babbage Auditorium, conference rooms for (Grace) Hopper, (Herman) Hollerith, etc. Most of the rooms were named after computing or mathematical historical people, for instance, Konrad Zuse (as I recall, there was an original painting by Zuse in that room), Ramanujan, Heisenberg, and Schroedinger (don't look inside!) and some for people who were not dead (though Grace Hopper did actually see her conference room) like Metcalfe and Boggs, Gordon Bell, Jean Sammet, etc.
Each room had a likeness of the person, one or more plexiglass plaques describing their accomplishments, and artwork related to their inventions/discoveries. It was always interesting to go into a new conference room and see who it featured and what they did.
(We had Edison, but I don't remember their being a Tesla room... Any former inhabitants of ZKO recall?)
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
While not overtly artsy, I've always been fond of the posters that Javvin makes.
I've got their network protocols map on the wall of my office.
Uhm... Tux, obviously.
http://store.xkcd.com/
At the bottom.
ThinkGeek have a range of posters by Despair Inc.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/exclusives/8aec/
Although Dilbert is always good.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
Go with Leonardo's work, you know, artwork like the Mona Lisa, Last Supper, Vitruvian Man etc... I watched this documentary narrated by Tom Hanks - you wouldn't believe all the secret codes hidden in those things.
Around 1998 I saw a poster for Intel with an image similar to this one: http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/images/1993_intel_pentium_large.jpg But with much more colour, in a shop as advertisment, I have never forgotten it, and it still amazes me.
There are all sorts of cool visualizations of the internet. IE: http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/com_test/dsnl.aspx (look along the left gutter for a link to a higher res version).
You could print and frame these!
ASCII art.
I have four words for you: "Map of the Internet"
He has been doing digital art for over 30 years:
http://www.davidem.com/em_gallery_page/em_gallery.html
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I've decorated several new offices by going to eBay and finding vintage advertisements from the industry I'm working in. They usually go for about $4 a piece. I take them to a local framing shop and put a nice matte & frame around them...mattes add some color if the ad is black & white. Use all the same frame and it looks like they're part of a set.
Is cheap, looks cool, looks professional, and educates you on the history of your discipline, all at the same time.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
For extra points, you can use actual source code written for Piet, an Esoteric Programming Language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet
I belive it was CSE (communications security establishment, Cannuck version of NSA) who took one of their old CRAY super computers (the big C ones), and turned it into a fountain / waterfall with benches for their lobby.
Rack-servers aren't as cool for that though.
A Universal Turing Machine Magnet:
http://boothseventeen.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=72
Next to fractals, how could you get anymore CS than context-free grammers?
From the Website:
Contextfreeart.org
Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
...PHI ZAPPA KRAPPA!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/languageposter_0504.html
http://www.levenez.com/lang/
An instructor at my college has those running along the hallway outside his office.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
How could you forget ASCII art? What could be more geek?
Umm, just don't let some troll post goatse on your wall, though.
No matter what your tastes are..you must have an AWESOME POSTER
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Edward Tufte's favorite graphic, of course:
Napoleon's March
A big part of software design is towards the ultimate goal of displaying data and information in a clear, informative manner. So why not display one of the finest examples of that?
And who cares that it's not "high tech"?
Corollary to Hanlon's razor: Any significantly advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
The title of the poem was "Datawocky" [a clear satire of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"], and it had a rather surreal illustration that I am still looking for.
The infinite series of tubes has preserved the poem, sans fictional attribution, but I can not find the illustration.
As a standalone poem, it's a bit insipid. But a copy of the original article, with illustration, is a work of art that I have been searching for, unsuccessfully, for years now.I can see the fnords!
I have these hanging from my walls: http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/youre_doing_it_wrong.html
When I worked at the University of Memphis, they used old hard drives and such. They disassembled them, glued them to a board, and then put them in shadow boxes.
This guy makes sculptures with computers.
just put up a giant picture of HAL overlooking the office with the tagline "skynet or bust".
No, not porn, you ...
Big prints of beautiful locations nearby are more aesthetic than computer memorabilia and more useful as mind-relaxants. They also help people identify with the town/borough/district where they are working.
You could always just print this out and frame it: http://www.dmc12.info/MegaFluxCap1.JPG
Back when I was in college he suggested putting 'Computer Science' in binary on the floor tiles in the hall way.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Anything but that bloody duck hitting the computer with a mallet.
Actually, let's face it - everyone's 'done' chip dies, fractals, ray tracing etc. (no offense other guys), so why not go for some non-IT-oriented aspirations: landscapes, beach scenes etc. because you'll be stuck in front of IT all day anyway - hey, maybe get someone with 'shopping talent to put the odd bit of technology 'on the beach', 'under the waterfall', 'on the moon' etc.? - and if you want some 'homage', how about some pictures of Babbage's Difference Engines, ancient navigation aids, Stonehenge, Ancient Abacus, Mayan Calendars, old chronometers, a Megalithic Passage Tomb (Newgrange, Ireland)?
AT&ROFLMAO
Get a professional decorator in and give them pointers... 9 times out of 10 if you leave a geek to plan that kind of stuff it will end up looking too geeky and unprofessional or just plain ugly. It's a "business" place, not your den.
Whether drunk guys with boards strapped to their feet or alien wheat benders sending secret messages, some of the aerial shots of the more elaborate crop circles are just darn spiffy and show some good math.
They're really cool when done using gradients.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram
Code for generating them...
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=190245
Example...
http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~chultqui/houdini/images/heightfield_voronoi_part.png
-- The Hoss Man
You can't go wrong with portraits of Ada Lovelace... nude. (No relation to Linda Lovelace,)
Line Printer Snoopy Calendar!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Another cool idea is kind of a "digital fishbowl" -- get an old tablet PC or iMac (or even just a digital photo frame) and have it run Golly cases (or in the case of the photo frame, a sequence of Golly generations).
I can see the fnords!
or made by Alex Grey.
Get some contributions from the local Art Department.
Start a class that would create digital art. Have two sessions, one for CS majors and one for Art majors. Teach some CS majors art (or at least multimedia data structures) and teach some art majors some simple programming and algorithms. This will give the instructor some insight into teaching people new or unfamiliar to CS so that they may be better able to teach the infamous CS I class. Also, you might want to use some wall mounted LCDs as giant picture viewers, that way the art can be changed at a whim (think parent's weekend and campus tours, sell the department).
Your goal shouldn't be finding math that imitates art; instead you should find art that reflects the essence of the math geeks you work with. Generally for example, impressionism isn't going to be helpful, but cubism is often appealing. The main thing is: an interest in art is about creativity, consider that.
Put in another way. I'm a fan of the movie "Stranger than Fiction". One of the brilliant things they did were visuals for a fellow with aspergers. Art for math geeks, engineers, etc, is often found with a confluence of their craft with the real world. For example, I absolutely love powerlines -- I have taken hundreds of photos of powerlines around the world.
Seriously, if you are really after *art* -- you have to pursue the heart of the matter. No boilerplate nonsense, none of this "what you are supposed to do". You've got to capture the essence.
If you are truly a Computer Science Department, then why not approach the Art Department, or more specifically, the Graphic Design Department with this as a student project for a semester.
That way a student can contribute something to the university and get credits at the same time.
-Romeo
Commission this guy to make you some posters, he's incredible: http://www.benfry.com
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
How about getting some nice prints of some of the stuff from ACiD? I love that old-school ascii art...
Or you could print Natalie Portman and hot grits on a dot matrix printer...or goatse.. It's up to you..
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
If you want fractals that you're unlikely to see elsewhere: try here If you prefer humor try this one
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/tsp/
I'd check out Roman Verostko, one of the pioneers of algorithmic art.
This guy is very cool and very futuristic! He uses flash and a bunch of algorithms, along with sketches to generate art on the fly and runs his algorithms for a bit, then pauses and saves images. Here is his site and do go for a look! He is quite expensive now! But maybe you could order a couple of prints rather than commissioning new art.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
- Ben Fry
- C.E.B. Reas
- Jennifer Steinkamp
bitforms represents some great artists.Also check with your university's art department. They probably have some great students and faculty working with technology.
I suggest a robotic head that follows you down the hall while showering you with compliments. It will help to boost the self-esteem of the CS majors.
Or animatronic fish crying out in pain. It will remind the CS majors that some people do have it worse than them.
Or a disembodied robotic hand that points at you and accuses you of crimes against humanity. OK, this is just weird.
http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/
cool pictures at the start of each chapter.
I worked with someone who does some good "artist-guided, computer generated" art. See his stuff here: http://wgexpressions.com/
-Brad
Vasarely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasarely
Need I say more?
Stonewolf
I have an old telex printer here that prints out some pretty interesting piece of art from time to time, though, they're pretty abstract.
a nice demotivational poster or two. There's also a few computer related one's here.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
and its all done with computer algorithms.
I would say demoscene, demoscene and demoscene. Google, wiki it, pouet.net (altough not the friendliest place in the whole wide world). But basicly its programs, that runs, effects and music, game develper tech, but not interactive. You could get some cheap lcd screens and run demo's trough them. check out demoscene.tv for examples, now this is a proect that capture screens and encode it so it can be watched on the fly, but demo's are executables. Other then that check this out. http://www.generatorx.no/ It is code in the art, or the art in the code. Any way it is several techniques to produce art and a art. For example some really jiffy way to display th code to supermario or such. I thought it was neat. http://www.generatorx.no/ you could probably contact the people behind it to find out ore or see if they can print something for you. Thats my advice atleast.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
I suggest a poster of the complete decimal representation of the largest known explicit prime number:
http://www.perfsci.com/souvenirs.htm
there are some cool posters here:
http://www.maplesoft.com/contact/webforms/poster_request.aspx
you just have to sign up but after that it is completely free to request (I have one of them and they are of pretty nice quality being free)
Somewhere in my basement I've got some IBM promotional posters from the '80s. I especially recall one for the 3270GA that in one corner featured a version of Hokusaiâ(TM)s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. I don't recall if it was the derivative work, The Wave of the Future (http://vorpal.us/img/waveofthefuture.jpg), but it was very similar. I guess I need to go dig those out again and check their condition.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Gallery of Computation
How do I get that red Zaku that is in their office?
Better yet, how do I get a powered Zaku similar to the one in the office!
http://www.atai.org/softwarewar.png
or...
http://mshiltonj.com/software_wars/current/
Or, just hang some old motherboards and 5"-thick hard drives on the wall...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Back in the late 90s I worked at DSI ( precursor to EA Canada ) and there was a guy there ( Bruce Dawson ) who had written a very cool Mandelbrot renderer. I just googled him and found it, checkout the thumbnails at the URL: http://www.cygnus-software.com/gallery/stampindex.htm
Not exactly nerdy art, but still digital art created mainly using a computer http://www.yayart.com/
We had a picture of Isidore of Sevilla, the patron of IT and the Internet.
The first computer - the Babbage Difference Engine, The first programmer - Ada Lovelace. Many posters of both about. Even a subtle encouragement for female students to emulate the genius of Ada.
A CS department? Try "The Kiss."
I'll leave the exercise of finding a poster women will enjoy up to the reader.
I recently donated a copy of the old 9-track line-printer poster tape to the Computer History Museum. I'd print a bunch of them off (if you can find a real line printer :-), tape 'em together and use them for artwork; just like we did in the 70's.
I recommend asking your students and faculty for their own artwork that they think would fit in this area. You could restrict the theme as desired (or not). A contest could be made out of it. When visitors are admiring a piece of art, it is great being able to tell them the story behind it, and even better when that story involves one of your own folks.
http://xkcd.com/195/ A must have for any CS department
Casey Reas and anything from the processing folks:
http://processing.org
http://generatorx.no
Cory Archangel has some great 8 bit stuff:
http://beigerecords.com/cory
If you've got a mega budget, buy an original Nam Jun Paik video installation.
Find an old machine that has blinkenlights.
How about a poster of the DeCSS source code?
Here at the University of Washington, our department chair has spent considerable effort curating our new building's art collection, and the results are spectacular! Instead of going for a CS theme, he chose to feature artists that have some sort of connection with the UW, which has lead to an impressive collection of artwork.
Some of the coolest computer art available is generated by Michael Trott, an employee at Wolfram Research using very specific algorithms and Mathematica. http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/trott/ http://www.graphica.com/gallery/
There's an image out there to which I will not link but, it is well known by a single name which could be an acronym for
Gross Old Anus, Testicles Swing Easily
Buy one of these (or build your own). It's easy to find cool images online... just look at all the suggestions. No need to limit yourself to a couple of framed posters.
Find a projector or a big LCD and connect it to a computer running Electric Sheep. Bonus points for wiring up a pair of "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons next to it. Electric Sheep is a "collaborative screen saver." When the machine is idle and the screen saver kicks in, it downloads and displays cool fractal animations known as the "sheep." At the same time it is rendering frames for a new sheep and uploading them to the sheep server. When you see an interesting sheep, you can press "thumbs up" (up-arrow) if you like it or down if you don't. The sheep server uses the ratings when selecting sheep as inputs to a genetic algorithm for creating a new generation of sheep.
It's open source and been around for a while. I believe there is an installation at the Googleplex and it has been shown at the NYC MOMA.
I think you ought to have a map of the Internet on your wall. ThinkGeek used to sell one, but they don't seem to have it anymore, sadly.
However, if you have access to a reliable printing shop (and being a university department, you should) consider printing and/or re-rendering one of these visualizations for your wall.
Random and weird software I've written.
Check out the book titled "A Computer Perspective" by Charles and Ray Eames. It's essentially a catalog of an exhibit that was installed in the IBM headquarters. It covers much of the early history that predates modern computers, including the intellectual and engineering pioneers who developed the foundations for computing.
It might be a good place to start for source material. And it would help students put things in perspective.
Go for the good stuff:
http://flickr.com/photos/devinmoore/sets/72157601859714574/
(gratuitous plug)
stuff |
Simple
A bunch of cd's marking out the molecular structure of caffeine in a tribute to the one chemical that legally keeps any computing department working :)
Everyone loves the Babbage!
Now, the FLOOR.
Where would you be without the floor?
Nowhere, I tell you. Because without floors, we would not have carpets. Without carpets we would not have tapestries. And without tapestries, we would have no need for a 19th-century card-programmable automated loom -- Jacquard's Loom.
Now, without Jacquard's Loom, Babbage would not have come up with the Analytical Engine (at least not when he did), and without that, we would not have had Ada Lovelace's foray into the CS field.
And without Ada Lovelace's shining example, CS would be a field devoid a chicks, unlike the current state of --
Wait, never mind. Bare concrete will be fine.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
This subject brought a laugh. Back in the early'80s our new CS department had just gotten a color graphics printer. A number of us were taking a class on algorithms and the current subject was fractals and the Mandelbrot set. Our instructor took the best of our "creations" and posted them in the hallway near the CS/Math department office. We came back from dinner one evening and found all the "artwork" had been removed. It seemed some well-meaning lady was offended by our "satanic" pictures so she tore them off the walls and ripped them to shreds. She left a letter with the department secretary that said if such things were displayed again, she'd have no choice but to report the department chairman and the instructor to the regents!
for the internet in 3D. It was a video, iirc, but it was cool that the vid could spin it around. Our (or previous) generation didn't have it then; we use it now to pay our bills or buy used goods. For these students, they could take it even further. Anything is possible.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The original "computer artist" - Conceptual school, made highly abstract digital art from the late 70s onward, originally using JPL's animation system from making the Voyager "Grand Tour" movie. Not sure if he helped with that piece, however, as his work was much more abstract. Some of his recent work is digital but based on rock art from the Southwest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Em
http://www.davidem.com/
I'm not sure if there are posters of his work, but digital frames might be a good answer.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
What else?
Here are some of the historical computer related stuff I have hanging around, though art is OK, I like reminders of where we were before.
/. parser was not letting me have too thin of lines.)
Album Covers
- First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival album Cover (circa 1976 Creative Computing)
- COMPUTER MUSIC from the UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS - circa 1963 or later...
- Pac Man Fever
Line printer art from the 60s/70s such as the one with Spock (the Spock one with him holding the enterprise model is approx 4x5'; yes, I have one on my wall)
Collage of VHS tape box covers (can find easier than posters), some movies to consider:
- Colossus: the Forbin Project
- Interface
- Forbidden Planet
- Tron, Wargames, Hackers
- Electric Dreams
- The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
- How to Frame a Figg
- Desk Set, Forbidden Planet, Metropolis
- Max Headroom, Prime Risk, Runaway, Sneakers
- Terminator, Weird Science
- 2001: a Space Oddessy
Classic Book covers:
- Basic BASIC, or other pivital programming book (except maybe "art of computer programming," that would probably be sacrilege)
- Creative Computing's Microcomputer Games
- Best of Creative Computing (look for those for some nice B&W page art)
- old Magazines like BYTE, Creative Computing, Datamation, Electronic Games, Dr. Dobbs Journal, etc. (especially if you find one with some choice headline like: "16K" now under $1,000!)
- There are a lot of cool old textbooks on computer logic, etc. that would work too, check out a used book store.
- What to Do After You Hit Return or P.C.C.'s First Book of Computer Games - some great listings with printouts and hand art.
Wall Mountable Computers:
- Chinese Abacus, Japanese Soroban
- Tandy Model 100
- a Bell Labs "Cardiac" computer kit http://www.porticus.org/bell/belllabs_kits_cardiac.html
- Slide Rule(s) (sticks and circular)
Add storage medium as a collage or as items:
- 8" floppy, 2" Floppy, Paper Tape
- Core memory Plane
- Tape Reel
- Computer Cassette Tape (either find an old radio shack data tape with the pseudo reels in it, or one of the IMB PC Jr. ones with Visicalc or some other choice title on it.)
- Program listing or printout, or maybe an old program run of strtrek on greenbar.
- Softstrip Data Page
- Flow charting template, or flow chart planning paper.
Ads comparing computers with 1980 features (you know, Apple vs Atari vs IBM (with cassette) or ads extolling the virtues of such computers.
Program covers
- like C language for the Commodore 64 (I know of two, Better Working and Abacus)
- There were some early AI books for the C64 and the like.
- Early Windows program Box (Windows 286?), or maybe a Microsoft Bob CD cover.
- "Chess Maniac 5 Billion and One" (yes thats a game title)
- Infocomm interactive fiction game Box for a DEC PDP (yes,those exist)
- Little Computer People Project
Pictures, like these:
- http://vandewettering.net/images/spacewar-big.jpg
- http://microship.com/bilge/blogpix/honeypride.jpg
- there is a really cool photo out there of an early 1900s computer room (room full of people performing math on early adding machines), cant find it.
That's it for off the top of my head.
Kids Board game box covers, or playing boards:
- Computer Rage, Pac Man, BlackBox, Input, etc.
There are also a few computer related jigsaw puzzles too, including one excellent round one, "Computer Talk" by Springbok, that's been out for some time.
That's it from looking around the room and memory... (had to pack lines
Frieder Nake: Homage à Paul Klee (1965)
Georg Nees: Schotter (1965 - 68)
Manfred Mohr: Cubic Limit I (1972 - 1975)
Paul Brown: Autumn (2004)
I would, perhaps, adorn the halls with now-public-domain portraits of famous logicians, a photo of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bjorne Strostrup, etc, maybe an image of an abacus, an image of a punchcard (floating across vat of mercury if you want to see something neat), posters of code from BASIC, COBOL, C, Pascal, Fortran, C++, Java, Perl, PHP and Python, maybe some Maple or Mathematica code, an image of the innards of an ic or two (perhaps an i386, an m68k, an alpha, and an amd64), and definitely a screensaver of flying toasters.
I think it would be better to adorn the walls with large flat panel monitors actually depicting programs than just static images.
Just a few thoughts.
Just to pimp some of my own work:
I developed a system to make pretty ice blue translucent sculptures, by extending Conway's Game of Life, but plotting "time" in the 3rd dimension: (in Java "Processing" language)
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ is the basic version,
http://kisrael.com/features/java/conwayice2/ is a bigger version that lets you set the initial seeding options.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
In particular his "Treachery of Images"
Escher of course is traditional, but how about fonts and typographic art?
How about Symbolist artists?
Gustav Klimt
And Jan Toorop
Of course, you could just take two cotton reels and a hot glue gun and put dabs of glue on the walls of the corridor and stick the cotton to it. At the far end of the corridor have a finishing line, the reels and a name plate with the words "Thread Race"
I have one of these posters. It looks pretty cool, and is mathematics-related:
http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm#Curta-Posterwww.despair.com. Go with the Demotivators.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
They have great posters; plus, the art was made with computers...
Posters are boring, if they don't have a chip embedded in them why bother? This is a question on slashdot and people don't come up with truly geeky solutions, what's up with people!
Why not get some friendly EE's to help wire up some framed LCD monitors so you can have computerized art.- Maybe some electric sheep screen savers running
- or take a page from any blackhat convention and display a running tally of what webpages are being surfed on the local wifi you're sniffing.
- Perhaps a scrolling display of passwords (Not telling the sites or the usernames, just passwords).
- Have a hidden webcam and a matching webcam/screen elsewhere on campus, instant 2 way
- Fake 'windows' of wrong seasons. I'd like to walk down a hallway in summer and see snow flying
The possibilities are endless.I second someone above who suggested Processing - http://processing.org/. Perhaps having students make projects and have the code and explanations next to the printed/interactive pieces. Informative and interesting!
Find the longest hallway and "Longcat is loooooooooong!"
Hit eBay and buy some old magazine ads for computer-related stuff. They look nice if you frame them, and it's cool to see how far we've come (and funny to see ads bragging about things like 10MB hard drives that are only the size of the average household refrigerator).
there is a large field of computer arts and 'new media art'
languages like processing, max-msp-jitter etc have shown how to use computers as the centre piece of art works.
then again, a print of it is a bit lame as so many progress has been made in form, but nonetheless vastly more interesting and to the point.
there's more to algorithmic art than garish coloured fractals you know...
Here I was picturing a petrified Natalie Portman with hot grits all over her.
A long stream of 0's punctuated by an occasional 1 is always nice.
How about a random screenshot from some random demo.
http://www.scheib.net/play/demos/what/eye/index.html
His artwork is great, much of it done with POV-Ray. He's got a zazzle page here. His website is pretty fascinating as well.
blah
How about the Blinkenlights sign?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
Peacock maps was selling this - there is a newer one that's not as aesthetic, not sure where to get the original. You can't have mine. Their "old" network maps are pretty neat too.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
How about posters of all the ways DeCSS has been portrayed, followed by all the representations of the AACS keys after takedown notices were attempted against them. There's DeCSS haiku, and a whole photo gallery of AACS key representations.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just don't spend money on a Giant Rusty Noodle or a set of Spikey Balls out of barbed wire. Wastes of money like those tend to piss off the CS majors.
The "Internet map" showing the connectedness of the Internet in various years.
The "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog" print.
The IPv6 addressing poster, I think from CAIDA.
A Telegeography undersea cable map, showing that the Internet isn't actually everywhere. Currently available from SCCN as a free promo.
Photos of the Head of School's computer from various years -- in similar frames, in a row, showing how far we've come. Or you could do the same with disk platters. You could do the same with old CPUs, leaving the heatsinks in place -- graphically demonstrating the huge increase in speed and its related heating problem.
A print of Metcalfe's ethernet design on a paper napkin.
A print of Dijkstra's "goto considered harmful" letter.
A print of the Lions' Book, that page with the "you are not expected to understand this" code with Lions' explanation.
Screenshots from IBM 370 JCL, UNIX prompt, Xerox Star, Apple Lisa, Apple Mac, DR GEM, Microsoft Windows 3.0, Microsoft Windows Xp, GNOME on Linux, MacOS X running down a wall.
Like all university departments, recent conference poster papers should be displayed.
A LCD showing the Luxo Jr CGI.
The reference image used for JPEG would be an interesting illustration and reminder of sexism in computer science. Just because you need a reference image with flesh tones doesn't mean you need to scan a page from Playboy.
Ephemeral from lab walls over the years. "Bill [the Cat] for president, Just Say No" could be amusing.
A DCMA takedown notice and a letter from RIAA. An anti-piracy poster for VCRs.
Photos of Morse, Marconi, Bell and Tomlinson, or of their machines. Perhaps with real a morse key, carbon microphone, phone handset and KSR-33 keyboard underneath to make it 3D and tactile.
A graph of USENET volumes versus percent of Internet users which use USENET. Recording the end of a dying protocol.
A LCD displaying the Atari Pong videogame. Similarly Space Invaders. Push a button to get sound for ten seconds.
Nagel face prints. Nothing screams 1980's computer fascination like Nagel prints.
To not include him in any discussion of CS art is a travesty!
You take really big pieces of ASCII art, and print them in text mode on a 9-pin wide-carriage dot matrix printer, preferably on the green-and-white striped trackfeed paper. You have to cut the artwork into columns first, because it's several pages wide. You don't have to worry about how tall it is, though, because of the continuous feed. Anyway, then you piece the pages back together side-by-side with masking tape on the back, and hang it up on the wall with blobs of yellow sticky tack.
Ideally, the ASCII art should depict inherently geeky things. A portrait of Spock would be good, or an enormous mandelbrot fractal that fills the whole wall, or maybe a schematic of an FPGA...
If you need something different for on another wall, a transcript of a game of Zork would be good.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Some of the Wolfram Mathematica posters are impressive:
http://www.zazzle.com/wolframresearch/products
Some of the E-boy art is fantastic. His, Web2.0 creation "FooBar" is great for any computer science office.
You don't say where in the world you are, but he's also drawn many of the major cities.
See more here
Amen. When I read the summary, my first thought was "Why SHOULD it be computer-related? Why not just art that CS majors might find interesting?" The first post suggested prints of Escher's work, which I thought quite appropriate because of their paradoxical nature, not to mention the beauty of the woodcuts, but being woodcuts, they're only going to be black-and-white (or grayscale). Then I thought: why not the works of Salvador Dali? Dali's technical brilliance as an illustrator was the foundation of his success as a surrealist. The bizarre, almost photo-realistic objects set in meticulously painted dreamscapes is to me a perfect metaphor for the unimaginable that may spring from the mundane, of the beauty and power inherent in tapestries of logic, woven from strands of 1's and 0's.
Everyone knows the drooping clocks of The Persistence of Memory, but what about the use of negative space to illustrate the subject of Invisible Afghan; or his habit of juxtaposing objects to create more images, as in Swans Reflecting Elephants? Dali produced about 1,500 paintings in his long career, and a good place to see a sample of his work is Virtual Dali. I think that while CS departments must ensure that graduates know the fundamentals, they should also be encouraging them to think outside the bounds of the ordinary. Dali's works reflect this conviction, in my opinion.
I just went back over the comments and saw that someone suggested Dali's "The Swallow's Tail". Nice to know that somebody else also thought about Dali.
At the risk of slashdotting digibarn...
A framed copy of the cover of Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" might be apropos.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...covered here on Slashdot. I don't know if Linuxcare still has the posters, but that post generously offers links to the Postscript, and to code to generate the imagery from kernel source (I haven't checked the links). I have this framed in my office in 36"x48" and it looks great, in my nerdy eyes.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
http://inliquid.com/artist/canfield_sarah/canfield.php -- image 2
Get some David Em prints in. Art history of the computer world!
No one seems to have mentioned Jared Tarbell at http://www.complexification.net/
Not entirely IT related, but I like both the Hubble Deep Field and the EM Spectrum posters.
Both are testaments to the achievements of science, and look really neat.
There's also the Universal Heritage and Solar System Chart, although neither look as arty.
|>
Here be Dragons
I have a giant Spock poster in my cube. I think that pretty much sums up all of computer science right there.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
David Em, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Ed Emshwiller, Karl Sims, John Whitney, Larry Cuba
Have something displaying one of these or others you find.
/. article just before this one.
From the
http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/
Xaos does autozoom and continually refreshes.
http://wmi.math.u-szeged.hu/xaos/doku.php
I like electric sheep
http://www.electricsheep.org/
Galaxy simulator
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/galaxy/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=304
God I wish I knew where they came from, 'cause I'd love to have a copy myself. These used to hang on the wall of the 7th floor at UUNET waaaay back in the day ... where the sysadmins hung out ... at least that's the only place I've ever seen them.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/unix-magic-overacre-poster.jpg
the above is just one in a series, there were several others.
If you can find them, they'd be great.
This is an artist from the 1950's, and his work really struck a chord with me as a computer scientist (and the son of a machinist). Check out some of his stuff: http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/02/media-artzybasheffs-machinalia.html http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/02/media-artzybasheffs-neurotica.html
Some interesting work I've seen.
To truly make a computer science student think: They should be exposed to the facts of the real world. Most people are stupid...or just ignorant, near-sighted, and/or selfish. A lot of those people wield the majority of the power. They cannot do this without scientists.
Find a picture of Truman standing next to Einstein. Says it all.
(/pessimist)
There's an artist in Switzerland making art using old computer parts, factory reject CPUs, etc. Fancy a painting with 32 CPUs in it? She does commissions. Check it out: http://www.7-crows.com/painting/recycled.shtml
I love Dali and Escher as much as the next, but if you don't want don't want to be boring, try one of these: http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/category/object/global-tags/pixorama/ . . . or one of these . . . http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/category/object/global-tags/ecity/ Instead of showing some ideal mathematical statement, these show some of the things that are possible with a computer science.
There is a lot of awesome Astronomy pictures available from the Hubble website. Nerdius Maximus here has downloaded 3Gb of it. Watch out for the 200Mb Jpegs though :)
Agreed. Show what REAL comp-sci is about:
Photos of the Apollo AGS / LEM Guidance Control control panel.
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/LM-Panel-Sept1968.jpg
Maybe with a snippet of the source code (Luminary 131 and Colossus 249) which were written in assembly, inset in the image?? http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/hrst/archive/1701b.pdf
2,000 15-bit words of erasable core memory and 36,000 words of read-only ("rope") memory, yet this software helped land men on the moon and got them back to earth!!
How 'bout a shot of the Mars rover, the one that was nearly lost due to a bug, then the VxWorks OS was upgraded from 65 million miles away @ the rate of 2K/sec for three days. "interplanetary roadside assistance!"
http://science.howstuffworks.com/mars-rover1.htm
Designed to run for 3 months, they've run for YEARS!
That is what Computer Science is all about!!
http://www.kevinmackart.com/ Original artwork from an academy award winning artist. Computer generated, mathematical foundations.
http://www.levenez.com/unix/
How long can nerds talk computer art until Chuck Close gets mentioned?
He's not wedded to the computer but his work constantly explores how images are composed of smaller units (we'd call them pixels)
http://www.rcs.k12.va.us/csjh/8th_05/web_05b/Thomas/artwork_images_139_203464_chuck-close.jpg
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
How about a nice poster of John McCarthy?
(With some gentle words of encouragement below...)
The notation of the original text is quite striking, just cryptic enough to remain mysterious while giving the reader the impression that it can't really be all that hard to figure out what it means.
It is, in a word, art. And it deserves to be on someone's wall.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
If a "Powers of 10" poster exists, it would make an excellent reminder of the growth rate of exponentials - something every computer scientist should keep in mind.
I discovered this piece of algorithmic art a few years ago and I have always liked it. You can also find lots of computer generated art at the Context Free Art Gallery.
Why would you renovate an office only to put old forms of artwork in there ? :)
This is computer schence, put some digital picture frames or something in there for cryin out loud !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Grace Hopper Pin-up!
Cynicism, like dogmatism, can be an excuse for intellectual laziness. - Susan Shirk
a wall full of bash.org submissions?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
How about CG images of:
* orthographic/isometric/perspective projections;
* Bezier curves and meshes;
* Ray-traced torus, tea-pot;
* fractal height-fields (mountains and beaches);
* Rosettes, tiles and tesselations;
* Koch snowflakes, C-curves, and Hilbert-curves;
* quadric surfaces and equations;
* some images from Disney and Pixar movies (with explanations of their respective techniques);
[Tarzan, Dinosaurs, Toy Story, Monster Inc, Shrek]
http://desire-art.com/ for CSs?
I did a quick text search on the page, and was surprised that I didn't see this idea mentioned anywhere on the page. How about "Hello world" written in all the popular languages of the period. Everything from PDP-11 assembly through to Java/C#/Ruby?
Algorithms usually aren't simple enough to reduce down to a graphic. Show me a good algorithmic representation of a shift operation of an R-B tree!. How about hash table with linked-list insert? Hmm, perhaps polygon edge detection for a raster line? Snooooze!!!
Real suggestion....
One or two dozen different representations of "Hello world" would certainly be appreciated by the majority of visitors to the office -- I expect most of the visitors would be C.S. students. And it's a good way to remind them of where the field came from.
Get a real work of digital art from the widely recognized, "father of computer art", Charles Csuri.
Examples of his work are at his web site:
http://www.csuri.com/
His work does not come cheap though. Send him an email if you want to purchase a signed print...
contact_us@csuri.com
For the love of god, do not paint the walls white. Nothing kills creativity faster than just simple white walls.
I think something cool to do would be to create a student made graphic for the walls. Start it at the front and expand it out every year with additional graphics in a scrapbook style. It'll cost you a bit, but in the long run if you only do it piece by piece, you can have a history going back and a really cool wall version of your yearbook.
Here it is. http://www.levenez.com/unix/
It is like an equivalent of a nice map hanging on the wall.
This is more of a graphics thing, but how about getting a democoder to whip something up for you involving the Utah Teapot? [Wikipedia.org] It's an important artifact for computer graphics and has history behind it. Plus, it's not something everyone knows about and is totally tired of, such as Escher.
Get some old monitors and display a selection of stuff from http://proce55ing.org/
http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/aaron/hi_cohenbio.html
A professor I worked with at UCSD. One of the few artists ever to utilize computer science in the making of new art.
I have been using computers for art since before time ( well a long time anyway). Back in the 80's I looked at the Amiga as a valid medium for the artist to use to create fine art. It is the same as oil paint, watercolor, acrylic etc etc. Nowadays, with my Wacom stylus and Painter software I create paintings on the computer. You cant even tell that they aren't originally done in some traditional media There is no better way today than by this system. I even compose all my traditional media paintings on the computer first. Isn't that the state of art computing? And wouldn't this be better than trying to be "electronic" or computer synthetic in look? The art itself should portray the message of "here be Computer Science"- not the "look" or style thing which has been done to death. How is new art going to happen when we spend our whole time looking at the medium we use rather than the art?
People have forgotten test images of times past! When image processing was new and exciting there were reference images of a baboon, the bay area from a Landsat camera and Lenna:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
David C. Munson, editor-in-chief, January 1996 IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, cited two reasons for the popularity of the image in research:
âoeFirst, the image contains a nice mixture of detail, flat regions, shading, and texture that do a good job of testing various image processing algorithms. It is a good test image! Second, the Lena image is a picture of an attractive woman. It is not surprising that the (mostly male) image processing research community gravitated toward an image that they found attractive."
Lenna is so widely accepted in the image processing community that SÃderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997.
Bring back Lenna!
You just need a tap or SPAN port on your main Internet connection, plus a separate workstation with a reasonably good graphics card to run the visualisation.
I thought this would be just the thing for our reception area, but sadly my boss vetoed it. (I thought management were meant to like shiny.)
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
you could try pictures of the olden day computers that took up entire rooms or buildings. also you could try printouts of procedurally generated artwork. Artwork consisting of perlin noise can be fairly aesthetic.
If there were any justice in the world, this would be modded up to five for shear glorious geekiness. Thank you, oh, AC. I'll be saving your post as a text file.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Be subtle.
Choose the paint scheme carefully, and you won't even feel the need to cover it with art.
If you do find areas that can be improved with the tasteful selection of art, be sure to present the work correctly. So oftem I see very nice works lost or dimished through poor framing and/or lighting (or just poor placement). In short, it is more important that you pay attention to the basics rather than spend a lot of time on 'theme'
I will vomit so hard it comes out my eye sockets if I see another CS department with M.C. Escher, rainbow-colored 3d plots, or fucking fractal art pieces. These look SHITTY and show no A) imagination nor B) taste.
Show the world that engineers have *some* creativity instead of cloning the halls of every other CS department. Even Kandinsky or another Dutch artist (besides Escher) like Mondrian would work.
Just take a second to choose pieces with less obvious and literal connections to math and computers. Maybe try a tasteful theme: look for classical examples of art that utilize the Golden Ratio. Perhaps try hanging a one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective paintings next to each other (but not some overly-complicated, geeky-as-fuck six-point perspective) and see how many people notice the theme. Art is about the joy of discovery.
BTW, a little color coordination would go a LOOONG way. Try to match your pieces instead of throwing up (and I do mean "throwing up") a crapload of clashing pieces.
IF you hang up even one Escher, fractal, 3d plot, polyhedron or god forbid Celtic knot you're fucking fired. If you don't like Kandinsky, fine. But don't hang up the CS department cliches. Show some depth.
http://www.bridgesmathart.org/art-exhibits/jmm08/bosch.html
features some interesting art created from solutions to large node VRP and travelling salesman logistical problems
it's geeky without being obvious
infosthetics.com propose several awesome pictures. I'm fan of the map of science (research domains identified by keywords, and linked according to co-citation between research papers). It feels me like understanding how our individual work contributes to a collective effort.
Also, this article is titled "IT posters to cover your empty walls". Could be relevant ?
Have a look at the set design of the British sitcom, The I.T. Crowd. I think the the office in that show demonstrates everything an IT office should have in the walls if the geeks were in total control of their office.
I kinda like Victor Vasarely's OP-Art:
http://images.google.com/images?q=vasarely&lr=&btng=Zoek!&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title
X.
Promotional posters of computer chips. I have one for an Intel 80286 on my office wall that is just gorgeous.
The atrium is decorated by two installations by John Maeda. He writes the user inputs a number having several digits, such as a telephone number (6133788991) or a special date (06211992). The computer processes the number uses a generic art synthesis program, and the resulting dynamic graphical content appears on the display. and The user is presented with a series of dialog boxes for two or three voices. Either alone or with friends, the user inputs text to simulate a verbal exchange. The resulting conversation appears on the display. These two styles of content reflect both an abstract art concept as well as a concrete communication Depending on the ambitions of your CS Dept Office I think you should aim as high as possible. Pick a well-know hero from with in your field and let them spend the time and money on making something exceptional. Remember that good ideas are born inside a single brain...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Stonehenge_back_wide.jpg
Flying toasters, and those rats that race around the track.
I find this poster quote adequate, When you pirate MP3s, you're downloading COMMUNISM.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
How about a little home made art??? Take some old motherboards and junk and have a painting spree....Grab some spray paint and go to town on that old junk....You may make something interesting.
I'm sure that some student (or faculty) is using computers in their work, or commenting on computers, science of technology in the content of their work. Art students are poor, art faculty are also usually poor. You can (sometimes)get quite the deal on original work for your walls. And you'l be supporting the arts, and encouraging artists to use computers to generate their work or to comment on computers, science, or technology within their work.
Forgive me for posting a gratuitous piece of self promotion, but you may wish to consider some of my science related art.
Unfortunately my Alan Turing painting has been sold. However I have such subjects as George Boole, Nokola Tesla and Tycho Brahe available.
Or perhaps you would be interested in some Human Pathogens...
shardcore
http://www.shardcore.org
As seen here.
It's an abstract painting of hundreds of computer related terms and sayings. As the viewer, your goal is to find them all. You'll literally have hundreds of people gazing over the painting for hours trying to unravel it.
My office recently hung up about 12 Apple Think Different posters of famous people like Thomas Edison, Einstein, Jane Goodall, Ghandi, etc... and they give me something to think about each time I walk by. They're tasteful black and white. Say what you will about Apple, it's a nice series of posters.
ASCII pr0n
a map of the internet may be good:
http://store.xkcd.com/ (scroll down)
http://www.bitwisegifts.com/page/bg/CTGY/14000
http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/index.php
When I was in college I tried to get them to paint the CS building plaid and give it a giant pocket protector, but apparently I was the only one who truly understood my vision.
http://www.designbyalgorithm.com/
I stumbled on this at an art fair last year. Each image comes with the algorithm for generating it on the back. I have the algorithm framed right next to the picture.
Get a bunch of old/busted hard drives, and pull out the spindles. They are very shiny, and could be mounted to a wall for a funky looking mirror.
Maybe make a frame for it out of old CPUs
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Take several old machines, mount flatscreen monitors attached to them, and run visual simulations.
Take John Conway's life, and set it to run at a reasonable pace, and to cycle through a bunch of patterns.
Show screen savers of various BOINC projects.
Display cool/interesting webcams. Nasa, telescopes, local intersections.
You work in a Cs department, for crying out loud. Use those computers to show the art.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
1. "The Wave of the Future", (C) 1982, Nokes Berry Graphics (poster ordered from a Byte magazine ad in ~1983); a version of a famous Japanese wood carving with a modern CGI twist 2. mass market chart showing the history of computer languages (a freebie from O'Reilly) 3. mass market chart showing the history of operating systems (can't remember source) 4. "The Magnificent Recovery", Ara Hagopian (contemporary artist who's work is reminiscent of fractals or other mathematical images) 5. "Murphy's Law For Computers", poster (circa ~1980) 6. a 24" stone Buddha (purchased from garden supply store) 7. Tibetan prayer flag banner (the latter two are hung in the server room; while I can't provide concrete data, the assumption is they keep BSOD's at bay on few remaining MS servers)
You might want to take a look at art by these two artists:
Jason Salavon (http://www.salavon.com/)
Marius Watz (http://www.unlekker.net/)
... sanbase. You can get prints, or set up Dynamic Paintings, and be the envy of the art department.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Challenge the professors in the CS department to write an AI that plays Bomberman - and then have the wall display perpetually exhibit the showdown between them (five at a time), and keep a running score. :D
Bow-ties are cool.
You could go with photos of early computers like Enigma or ENIAC. If you have enough space you could show a progression to modern kit in time slices.
As someone who works and plays within the penumbra of computer science and art I would suggest commissioning something original. *cough* *ahem* *cough*
http://openbsd.org/orders.html
Or something interactive would be nice. Like a face on a flatpanel display that watches you as you move around the room. Perhaps with a caption "In Soviet university art watches YOU!"
good art? Then again, maybe "good" isn't the right criterion.
Yes, you could go the obvious way: images of fractals, MC Escher, art which visualizes mathematical concepts, either intentionally or (as in Hokusai's famous Wave) unitentionally. And perhaps this is the right way.
But first, ask yourself, why do you need art at all? Answer that question, and you're well on the way to answering what kind of art you "need".
You'll probably have multiple answers to that question, and each will suggest a different kind of art.
(1) Decoration. Anything that looks nice will do, although you will ideally choose things that aren't too obtrusive, but harmonize with the office environment.
(2) Make a statement. Well, what statement? Usually its a statement about who you are. If you want to say you are more than just uncultured geeks, then something with classical appeal. If you want to show that you are bona fide intellectuals, something more avante garde, although this might clash with the desire to decorate.
To make a statement about what you do, find unexpected examples of CS cropping up in art, or being artistic. For example, you could put up a number of large flat screen monitors that display continually changing, hyperrealistic computer generated landscapes. If it were me, the landscape would react to something, either the actual weather, or perhaps the academic calendar (e.g., "it's raining so midterms must be coming up.")
(3) Instruct. At one time, one of the most common types of poetry made was didactic; it was there not primarily for its aesthetic appeal (although it needed that), but to help the learner with difficult memorizations. While memorization isn't quite as important, there are other didactic functions art can perform.
For example, depictions of this history of computation might be an interesting choice, with portraits of important figures, diagrams and models of their inventions. Many technological items have an aesthetic appeal such as circuit boards and chips. You could display historic cicruit boards with notes on their significance; hang huge photographs of important ICs through the years. You could dissect hard drives of different eras and mount them tastefully in a frame, the way biology departments mount botanical and insect specimens.
(4) Be a Historical Document. I think the best thing would be to find art created by people working in the department: professors, workers, students. If there isn't enough, then perhaps you could add art selected by people working there with a little statement of why they like it. Over time, of course, the collection would expand, and need to be rotated in and out. Twenty years hence, people will come across something done by, or selected by, a person no longer in the department, and perhaps this will be remarkable to people who knew that person.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Any of the posters featuring the famous "UNIX Wizard" would be great in a CS department.
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."
20,000 artists are selling their art online at imagekind.com. They upload their art, and Imagekind handles the printing, framing and shipping. You're sure to find something there.
i have a friend who was a photographer for Newsweek during the golden days of the Space Race. he has an impressive collection of space and technology photography (some of which he has given me) that would look great on those walls. let me know
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
a 2001 one-sheet, preferably not in English, those look better IMO (of course a replica since I doubt they will splurge on an original)...
I have a lovely 256kbit core memory plane mounted in a contrasting brass-colored frame... which reminds me, I need to pull that out of storage and put it up in my cubicle again.
i like the idea of putting up raytraced art, but it can be tough to find tasteful CG art. i've always been a fan of giles tran.
PLEASE do not put up any fractals or 3d plots. it's a disservice to CS.
A friend of mine makes these very cool pieces : http://www.tristanperich.com/Art/Machine_Drawings/
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I've got a "map" of the Linux Kernel from a few years ago. It's a bit bland (basic coloured text/boxes on a white background), but there might be more exciting ones out there now. I've been able to find the original /. story (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/07/1327226&mode=flat), but not the actual poster.
Last post!
... a true milestone with a retro feel to it.
The Pink Floyd Painted Ladies sitting with their feet in the pool and their backs turned are an absolute delight. The real turn on is the artwork covering their backs ;)
http://despair.com/
I learned of this poster from one of my mentors years back. After searching years for it, I found a copy for sale on ebay. Now it sits in my office paying homage to the greatness of *nix.
The drawing is by Gary Overacre and was commisioned by UNITECH (now out of business I believe). A link to the an online version is here ( http://www.garyoveracre.com/portfolio/10.html ).
enjoy,
donede
ascii tux
Take a look at justinmullins.com. This guy picks equations in the same way the rest of us choose landscapes and picture postcards.
see if you can get a hold of a copy of the Red Hat annual report from the year they went public (fy2000). the letter to shareholders is a poster, and on the back is the source for the Linux kernel 0.1
i worked on that report, and i remember there being some long discussion about including some of Linus' less politically correct comments in the source, but the RH execs basically told the legal teams to suck it.
you can get the PDF from their investor site here:
http://www.redhat.com/annualreport_2000/rhar2000.pdf [PDF]
if you have a nice printer or plotter, it looks really good at full size.
share and enjoy.
Might as well. It'll probably be the last time you see them...
This poster maps out relationships between scientific disciplines using an algorithm. (relatively huge image) http://informationesthetics.org/documents/scienceMapPrintMockup.jpg It's artistic and educational. I think they have this poster for sale or you could probably get them to send a larger file to print on a large plotter since you're representing a school.
I worked at IBM in Warwick, UK in 1988, and one guy, an MVS systems programmer type, was emigrating, and clearing out years of detrius from his cupboard. He picked up a stack of punched cards (they were old technology by this time, you young whippersnappers) and he was wondeing what they were. The cards had no legible documentation on them. Just holes.
Then it occurred to him: "It's the snoopy calendar!"
I wish I'd taken a copy of them - although it was probably PL/1, the image data would have been valid (I'm assuming it was not compressed).
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
i really like the drawing 'vertical-horizontal number three' by A. Michael Noll. google search it for a picture and its history
http://www.electricsheep.org/
http://www.sgeier.net/fractals/
You might be interested in the posters of the "Can Computers Think?" debate from www.macrovu.com :
Map 1: Can computers think?
Map 2: Can the Turing test determine whether computers can think?
Map 3: Can physical symbol systems think?
Map 4: Can Chinese Rooms think?
Map 5, Part 1: Can connectionist networks think?
Map 5, Part 2: Can computers think in images?
Map 6: Do computers have to be conscious to think?
Map 7: Are thinking computers mathematically possible?