Archive for the ‘Computational Art’ Category:
Processing, the New Logo?
I should be writing a syllabus on a one-week programming and art workshop I’m teaching in December. Instead, I’m blogging about it. How very effecient! For the workshop I’ll be introducing kids to programming using art as an excuse. The language we’ll be using is Processing. I’m thinking of having the kids to either doing a simple/small network visualization or an iterative or randomly generated art piece as their ultimate objective.
In pitching this project I needed examples. Lots of examples that I thought of immediately were very new. Things like fractal art and tag clouds. But I forgot one very, very crucial example that most computer people from my generation actually know quite well: Logo.
Logo is old. But computational art existed as long as computers were around and ways of outputting images from computers were available. Norton Starr, one of my old professors, once showed me a computer generated image of a beautiful and symmetric graph he made in the 70s—a graph as in the graphical representation of a network. (<a href=”http://www.amherst.edu/~nstarr/graphics.html”>Here</a> is a more famous piece he did back in the 70s.) Granted, the images were made using what amounts of a primitive robotic arm holding a fountain pen. However, they were made possible using only the precision and computational power that only computers could provide. That’s what makes them computational art and not just art made on a computer.
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