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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!"
Those would be Atari games, not Altair.
ASCII art is cool enough, but RTTY art is where it's at!
-Anon.
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.
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.
Heroic NESbots battle the evil Famicons. More than meets the eye!
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?)
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.
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
I took Art Studies and studied Jackson Pollock paint splatters, pictures of naked Barbie dolls in various locations and positions, and arrangements of elephant turds on an image of the Virgin Mary and was told they were all "Art" and thus not criticizable (only critique-able). So much for thousands of years of cultural heritage.
Awesome, but not technically pointillism
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
You paid all that money and didn't even get to talk about how profound and amazing Piss Christ and Duchamp's Fountain were? Geeks should definitely stay out of art. Only professionals should be able to practice the craft. Wouldn't want them polluting the field with garbage, after all.
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.)
Yes, a mosaic I know.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
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.
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.
How come the Piet programming language didn't make the cut? :(
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?
It's where overweight geeks flock together dressed as NES controllers.
surely they used aalib. Which reminds me - aalib is a pretty flexible geek art tool.
You know what's really geeky? Studying art as an academic and enjoying thousands of years of cultural heritage.
Uh huh. What's art, smart guy? Got ya there, didn't I?
I spent most of my high school years in the mud room throwing pottery on a wheel. I was pretty good. Lots of friends and family still proudly display my pieces. Is it art? No, they're defined as "crafts." Shows what we know of art. However, I'd put some of my Raku up against the Mona Lisa, and defy you to tell me one's more beautiful than the other.
Later on, I decorated my homes with framed seismic sections (I was working as a geophysical tech). Is it art? Hardly. They were pictures of data. Given the same impulse (dynamite or vibroseis) and arrangement of geophones and weather conditions, they were repeatable. Were they beautiful? To me, you're damned right they were! Did they confuse the !@#$ out of visitors? You bet!
So, what is art? Art is what you want it to be. Don't get me wrong; Leonardo and Michelangelo (and many others) did many marvelous things, but I've seen things that five year old kids have done which were every bit as expressive. You pedestrians take art far too damned seriously. It's really just another way to express an idea or ideas or thoughts. You can do that with paint, pixels, words, or any sort of data or media. Some of the perl and C code I've written, I'd rate right up there with the Sistine Chapel (sorry Mike). Some of the math I've seen, I'd rate just as highly.
There's nothing magical about art, except that it's magical.
Bon soir, mon ami. :-)
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I took Art Studies and studied Jackson Pollock paint splatters, pictures of naked Barbie dolls in various locations and positions, and arrangements of elephant turds on an image of the Virgin Mary and was told they were all "Art" and thus not criticizable (only critique-able). So much for thousands of years of cultural heritage.
Art is push; not pull. If you don't get it, that's on your end; not ours. We don't much care if you get it. Expression is all it's about. If you enjoy it, yay, but that's not required. Make of that what you will. HAND. :-)
I think Pollock was a fool, but I still like some of his stuff. It's ... interesting. There've been lots of others who've done far worse stuff.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Geeks should definitely stay out of art.
Wow. That's so brilliantly stupid, it's practically art. Awesome!
Sort of like an elephant finger painting with his trunk. Were you dropped on the floor when you were born?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I can think of many examples of who are.
Yes. Look into the history of Michaelangelo's early tribulations wrt the Sistine Chapel. He was inventing it as he went along. Some of the early stuff he tried failed horribly (media! Ptheh!). He was geeky enough to pull it off brilliantly though.
Leonardo worked on Mona Lisa throughout his lifetime. That's serious attention to detail. That's a pretty long phase of maintenance of something you care about.
Galileo! His art (yes, I think science is art) was so important to him that he had to defy a Pope (which at the time was tantamount to blasphemy). Marie Curie's was so important to her that she was willing to die to get its secrets.
Steven Hawking, you're such a wuss. [Just kidding. :-)]
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Sprite Stitch
Just curious. What does:
mashing F5 on Slashdot
mean? In Linux running fluxbox, <ALT>-F[12] takes me to my other desktop. Is this a (gag me with a spoon) MS Win* thing?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
It was sarcasm directed to the arrogance of the AC I was responding to, dipshit.