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The Geek Art Movement
An anonymous reader writes "Is your work space drab? Do you want art to reflect your geekiness? Then you might like an art movement that has been gaining popularity over the past few decades. This is movement is 'Geek Art' where artists take inspiration from all things tech and geek. The art works range from 'Hello, world!' in 23 programming languages to collages of Old Atari games to more contemporary pieces like modern apps as Famicon software. It's sites like Redbubble and Society 6 which have enabled the independent artist to get their work out there while sites such as 20x200 take a more curated approach. 8bit retro is the new Mona Lisa!"
Famicon? Is that like a Famicom, except more deceptive?
Those would be Atari games, not Altair.
ASCII art is cool enough, but RTTY art is where it's at!
-Anon.
This hangs over our mantel. http://society6.com/product/A-Flying-Dog-In-Outer-Space_Print
BOOM
This is the most asinine thing I've ever seen posted.
You know what's really geeky? Studying art as an academic and enjoying thousands of years of cultural heritage.
I can think of many examples of who are.
it offends me what can constitute art these days
Reflect my geek? Who is my geek?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I used to be a demo-coder / gfx artist back in the C-64 & Amiga days, we did both ASCII art, and pixel art.
;)
Geek art is special to us, I'm in my 40's and amongst some of the "geek" artist pieces I do - is with 80's electronics components, I puzzle them together as "working art", meaning...it's like a digital sculpture that can be hung up on the wall, and it can DO stuff
Some of my friends make pixel art with beads & pearls, Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man etc. Very cool stuff. It's a special generation that will be remembered for this art. I can pretty much guarantee you that original artwork from those days will be worth a fortune in the future, pretty much like certain collectible games and retro computers are now.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
cat("hello world!\n")
I think I've proven something that I didn't want to know.
for such things as PCB art and the like. I own many pieces of geek art and I love it all. I think as more geek/nerd/techie artists emerge there is the growing "homage" to the roots of what made them who they are. A respectable rendre hommage to the tech they grew up with. I say the more the merrier.
About the movement part but I was thinking of another kind of movement.
I prefer my art in a form that's fascinating not only to the niche audience but to others as well. For me, this means interesting desktop ornaments from Shapeways. The options trumpeted in the summary feel way to...not to be so cliche but...hipster? Seems more of a focus on being unique than being appealing.
I like Photos printed on canvas. There are plenty of sites online that will print them to you and you can send them any file, not just your photos. My office wall has a couple computer-generated artwork. I also had a small goatse printed up which goes up on the wall for special occasions and special visitors :)
This is just hipster crap - science because its cool or whatever (see maddox's recent discussion).
Also, for the love of god, http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/using-namespace-std.html
(in this case, I guess its OK, but can we stop putting that globally?)
I made a 3' x 4' Princess Peach out of 980+ painted soda bottle caps:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Princess-Peach-Pointillism
My wife wouldn't even let me hang it over the fireplace!
A print of the southern Milky Way, from the Pointers (Alpha and Beta Centauri) to the Eta Carinae nebula. Including the Southern Cross and the Coal Sack.
A Georgia O'Keeffe print of a Jimson Weed flower that looks like a dogwood but isn't.
...laura
I made a 3' x 4' Princess Peach out of 980 painted soda bottle caps: http://www.instructables.com/id/Princess-Peach-Pointillism [Helps if I log in before I post.]
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Don't forget the hard drive platter mobiles.
When ASCII art isn't enough, there's always the Rasterbator. Feel free to click on it. It's completely SFW.
What about this?
http://www.linuxsuite.org
From boot till bash
Here's a guy that makes electronics art that I stumbled onto years ago. He takes parts from old TVs, VCRs, and other obsolete electronics and solders little people/aliens and the occasional animal out of them. He custom-made me a penguin (due to my fondness of Linux), which I'm fairly proud to own. Pretty cool stuff, IMO...
http://www.etsy.com/shop/obviousfront
My history wall (one wall of my cube) has an 8" TSR80 floppy disk, a DEC RX50 floppy disk, several IBM punch cards, a bare platter from an old CDC disk drive, and a framed plane of core memory from an unidentified early system (Burroughs is all I know). Pretty neat, and makes the young ones snicker when I tell them it probably still retains its part of the last print image of a character-porn picture from that system's operational time. Don't know if that would be ASCII art or EBCDIC art or some other character set though.
If coding was my primary job duty, sure, I could see this kind of art being pretty relevant. But even though I have an IT background, and some coding-related books sitting around, working at a large, modern telescope in a major observatory complex, my geekdom is more about space science, so the art on the walls (and my laptop's wallpaper) tends to be more along the lines of either stuff out in space, or stuff that looks at stuff out in space. For example, my current wallpaper.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I have about 150 prints on my walls (and a large framed print as well), all photos I have taken over the years. Camping, Mexico, Arizona, Korea, Ecuador/Galapagos, the places I have been and have fond memories of.
I also have a couple photos of my wife and kids as well...
I also have a " mud phone" which a friend of mine made about 12 years ago. He used earth from my yard and fashioned a cell phone out of it (complete with buttons, a screen, microphone, and speaker, with the words "Nokia Mud Phone" on the back). I'm surprised it has survived as long as it has, I think my yard had considerable clay in it's composition
I'm thinking about getting one of these as a coat rack for my cubicle (for $9 how could I go wrong...):
http://www.storesupply.com/pc-14143-607-mans-torso-forms-black-70220.aspx
BlameBillCosby.com
My idea of geeky art:
Michael Whelan print over my desk, and a Boris Vallejo print next to my monitors & Eta Carine as my desktop. @ home I have David Mack, Larry Elmore prints.
I stumbled onto this artist years ago who makes people from old TVs/VCRs etc. I've purchased a few of them over the years. At one point, I mailed him a box of parts that I had un-soldered from some old junk and he sent me some free capacitor guys... http://www.obviousfront.com
I'd count myself among those geeks. Not long ago, I bought an interesting etched silicon wafer off ebay (not too expensive, really), and then framed it and hung it on the wall. I think it's beautiful in its own right, and the geekiness just makes it that much better.
Framed Silicon
(On a side note, finding sufficiently large square pictures frames turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined.)
I'm wearing a t-shirt from Woot and have an old Bloom County cartoon of Opus doing battle with a Ronco ad spouting TV set stuck on my mini-fridge.
Does that count?
It figures.
Wait, RTTY art wants me to enable Java in my browser (Chrome)?
No thanks.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Yes, let's go make some Famicom cartridge labels, and pretend that that's all that's involved in making software! Want a product to become a reality? Just create some box art, and magically, the product is sparked into reality! Why waste money on programmers when you can just hire a few artists and create new software that way?
Never mind that a few real programs were actually created this way (Syncronys SoftRAM.)
I have a poster from the original Thunderbirds puppet show on my wall at work. Occasionally an older person will say "...I remember that show". It was one of my favorites, along with Original Trek, Outer Limits, Hitchcok, and Twilight Zone.
Not much real geek art myself besides the clock made from a platter of our old computer system. Do have a few old disks hung up like someone else. I framed my dead MMO disks, lol. I used my vintage music collection more as a focus than my computers as my door trim is old album covers and the framed pictures are a mosaic(Judas Priest logo, and picture of a 45rpm record) of all my album covers (no pilfering pics either, i shot my actual album covers myself)
Coffee table is a 1980 Wang minicomputer tho :)
Saving up to 'wallpaper' one wall of my computer room in PCB..halfway there.. :(
Did frame some of the free posters from old games. My old game boxes are stacked to appear to hold up a crack in the ceiling, 9 foot stack of retail boxes actually looks kinda cool.
The privacy curtain of CDROMs never got finished yet...someday
Prefer stuff i made but i guess the silver statue of the signature creature in my favorite MMORPG is art..and is even worth what i paid for it now!
These are the equivalent of Dogs Playing Poker as far as creating a one-time-only dating experience.
Table-ized A.I.
Gecko Romin' Art
Table-ized A.I.
Before slashdot invented the "lameness filter", some fool did Goatse in ASCII art. I had to give them credit for effort, even though they were a grade-A idiot. I wish I could mod them as such:
+5 creativity
-9999999 asshat
Table-ized A.I.
Clasical artists had to know pigments and to illustrate realism takes practice and understanding light, shadow, texture, etc. Getting into the modern art, I know Escher and Dali obviously were. Most early photographers were. (Had to know equipment and develop your own film until it became common enough.) By extension, early film. (Muybridge, Melies, etc.) All the guys known for classical animation definitely were. (Making just a simple short is a labor intensive and technical process. That still holds true with modern tools that streamline workflow, it's not exactly easy.)
And since I consider myself an artist to some extent, I probably am. It takes some geekiness, as all arts do have their technical aspects and those must be mastered if you expect to develop any proficiency in the art. Moreso given the workings of contemporary artistic media, there are so many nuances and avenues to explore in terms of process it can be ridiculous.
As for my art? I don't do much in the way of physical works (takes up space and can be expensive), so I prefer working in digital media. (Only costs are upfront and space used is on the hard drive.) I currently don't have much of an audience, but some of my works could be considered geeky in some aspects.
Some examples (if anyone cares to see what this one random 0 karma AC does)...
Turntable view 3D spaceship
Photo of softlight box made for less than $10.
A cheesy rip-off of SpaceWar in Flash (Not much a programmer, but managed some working ActionScript)
Hand drawn Sierpinski Triangle knotwork illustration
(That's the stuff I'd consider "geeky", much of the other stuff is intentionally bad or cheeky and some probably NSFW. Be careful browsing off into the galleries. Yet that may be normal considering what's typically posted at DA.)
Besides the visual stuff, I also putz around with LMMS and have some electronic "music" on soundcloud. Most of that is from exploring the software and getting better than expected results while experimenting. (Not a musician by any means.) I'm not sure how "listenable" most here would consider it, so not linking. Feel free to find it if you want.
As for state-of-the-art when it comes to art? Contemporary modern media combined with creative software lets people be "Renaissance Men" of sorts, as pretty much all arts are available for ready exploration and the information on what's involved is readily available on the internet. As long as theres some free time and the spark of creativity there, it's pretty amazing what people can do. Whether or not now is another golden age in terms of art movements or just the very beginning is still up in the air.
As for posting AC? Only posting as AC since I've never been arsed to register here. Go figure.
Individuality is great, and you should have things that are meaningful close at hand and on display, but just recognize that to most people geek art has about as much class as dogs playing poker. If you have non-geeky visitors and want to be taken seriously, maybe find something you like that is more mainstream for the living room. Same for your cube at work. Something geeky on your monitor and on your desk, something more mainstream on the walls.
Art is a troubling thing. On the one hand it is a signification of a culture, while on the other hand it's a word we throw at anything that titillates us as 'Art'. It's strange, we can readily call things art but can't agree on what Art really is. And it's even stranger, we've been making Art for a very long time without really questioning it on a wide dialogue. So, when something comes along and charges itself to be as Art, what's really being implied? When we say 'Geek Art,' are we saying it with the connotations of Art-- in that sense of profound or sacred reverence sorta way? Or, are we saying 'Geek Art' as artifacts that point to a nostalgia?
Geek Art is art, but I don't think it's Art. Geek Art does look amazing. It does look like something I would want to hang in my office. But would I want to have it championed in a museum? No. There is absolutely no merits in it as Art. Yes, it has artistic qualities, but no Artistic merits. I have yet to see anything come out of Geek Art that argues on the human condition. Geek Art speaks wonderfully to feelings of nostalgia, but it stops there. It should also be noted here that the nostalgia is very, very, very shallow; it speaks only to the hegemony that starts this kind of dialogue. Geek Art does not ask any universal profound questions nor does it entice any dialogue to emerge about our common situation. How would you even teach it as an Art movement? (Other than that it was a fad.) If you could figure out how Geek Art can contribute to Art, maybe then you could call it Art. But you would first have to figure-out what Art is, or at least what something does to get that meaning.
'I may not know what Art is but I know what I like.' is a common slogan for people who want to have their purchases glorified as Art. It's for fat pockets who want others fluffing over their sentimental attachments. (A wonderful group people for Artist to exploit, as they rightly should.) It's fine if you want to believe that it is Art, but that won't really make it Art. It's art, but it's not Art. If it doesn't help to further the conversation of what Art is, or how Art fits into the world, or how it contributes to the tradition of Art, then it has no place in really being called Art. You can market it as Art, but that still won't make it Art. So, if you point to how it 'looks' like Art, and therefore should be considered Art, then by that very same logic I would be just in saying a 'grocery ad' should have the same exact justification in being called the 'new Mona Lisa' as well. Geek Art is art, but it's no Mona Lisa, except maybe to those who can actually afford to buy into the idea that it 'really' is the new Mona Lisa. There is word for people like that: uncultured.
How come the Piet programming language didn't make the cut? :(
Anyone know where I can get poster size prints of covers of Analog magazine (or similar), _without_ the masthead? Some of that space art (old and new, I don't have any particular fetish for 60s or retro stuff) is darned nice to look at, but the only posters I've found include the magazine name, which kind of spoils it.
Geeks have been doing this for ages. The only thing different is that someone decided to write and article about it.
As someone who has a lot of experience with pixel art, I can tell you that the piece linked to in the summary is a cheap, lazy, piece of "art". Pixel art, is not, a mosaic filter over a picture.
How can I tell? The color bit depth is too high, meaning there are too many color variants on the pixels. Creating a pleasing piece of pixel art with a limited color palette is a true artform and requires a lot of skill and practice to form a convincing image. This piece is a lazy pile designed to cash in on the aesthetic, and was created using a simple filter.
Pixel art is not a filter. Too bad this couldn't have had the chance to be proved in court during the "Kind of Bloop" cover art debacle.
I'm quite sure there are plenty of other fails in that image, but I just opened and it hit me straight away. REM Balh blah @echo off @echo Hello world! Why? There is @echo off, if next echo line is prefixed with @sign? Also that REM will be printed out if it isn't prefixed with @or is not after the echo off line. So much fail. Can anyone spot other massive fails from it?
My first computer as a child made even more awsome: http://www.art-rash.com/pixelform/projects-TI99.html
Of course I can't use it professionally today, but oh, if only I had the time to put together a case-mod and make it run Slackware.....
surely they used aalib. Which reminds me - aalib is a pretty flexible geek art tool.
Because it's a FAMI-ly COM-puter.
Sprite Stitch