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.
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?
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.
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.
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
How about some nice Bill Gates pics?
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
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
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."
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
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!
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
I've been secretly substituting them for the motivational posters at work. heh. heh.
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!
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.
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.
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.
...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
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
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!!
Despair posters are excellent. The Mistakes one was a big hit at our help desk.
Cluelessness
and Problems may be quite appropriate for a CS Department.
Or just watch them All .
If a trainstation is the place where trains stop, what is a workstation?
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.