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?"
Dilbert everywhere. Let the students know what they can look forward to.
-- Dear God, please save me from your followers.
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?
Lend some credibility to visitors by showing what computer science does for everyone. Escher? No CS required. You might as well put up the Mona Lisa. Fractal Art? Yawn. Nothing says useless to the public like fractals and magic eye. Slashdot Story Art? Even this audience didn't have much nice to say. How about modern architecture, transportation or electronics? CSs are a varied discipline. Let's remember, the submitter says this is a university. Let's keep the Fractals and pi to a thousand places to individual cubes.
I couldn't help but picture a hallway adorned with nicely framed images of goatse and tubgirl.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
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."
Line Printer Snoopy Calendar!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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
Salvador Dali's final painting is titled "The Swallow's Tail - Series on Catastrophes". You can look at it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swallow's_Tail
The trick is getting a print. I saw this piece while it was on loan to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida and they did not have the ability to produce a print due to copyright. I believe that the copyright is held by a similar Dali Museum located in Spain.
If anyone manages to get a print, please let me know how because I was ready to drop copious amounts of money for a high quality print and I left disappointed.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
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."