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'.
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.
...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.
How about some nice Bill Gates pics?
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.
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
Line Printer Snoopy Calendar!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
"And welcome to the Dijkstra Hall of Computer Science! Construction has just finished, and we're delighted to have you here! We're going to start at the top and work our way down to the lobby, where there's refreshments for everyone here taking the tour. This here is our Department head's office, a room second to none in the country, I might add. From here he can monitor the clusters on the fourth, fifth, and nineteenth floors from his quadruple monitor display system. (A couple of them are off, but I'm sure those two G5's under the desk there will keep them company! *snicker*) And on the right you'll see a few pieces from the Director's favorite museum, the Stedelijk Museum. Please notice that coffee table, especially. Lots of funding went into that leg rest! Okay, let's head out! But on your way out, please take care to notice the 6 foot by 4 foot poster of a train crashing through a building with exclamatory "OH SHIT!"; that gem was wrestled off the hands of "easyart.com" and is quite possibly this buildings greatest asset, wouldn't you agree? "Framing that sonnuva bitch", our Dean has said, "was the best goddamn idea I've ever had. Bar-none! Check out those track lights! Damn."