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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?"
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."
Throw a challenge to the art department: Represent modern computing.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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
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.