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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?"
To remind people that mistakes have consequences and to think through what they are doing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A Mandelbrot set is very easy and very cool. I've always been fascinated with the set and have wondered what would be the best way to make a nice big landscape printout of it.
import system.cool.Sig;
...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.
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.
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
http://www.contextfreeart.org
any number of options from http://despair.com/
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
Ummm, ignore that trailing slash. Retry
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."
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!
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
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
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!
Throw a challenge to the art department: Represent modern computing.
I drank what? -- Socrates
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/tsp/
Here is a modern Ada Lovelace print. Would be cool to put up a woman for the dept.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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.
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.
Or you can combine traditional artwork but redone in a "geeky" way. Take something famous and recognizable and Rasterbate it.
...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