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?"

Several Suggestions

[eldavojohn (898314)]

M. C. Escher
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 [mcescher.com], infinite limits [mcescher.com], undefined boundaries [mcescher.com], etc). For the most part, I believe he did woodcuts [mcescher.com] so if you're thinking about originals ... well, woodcuts are an odd market.

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 [fractalism.com] to subtle [fractalartcontests.com]. This is common and widely created.

Slashdot Story Art
A while back, there was a story on some humorous computer science-y art [slashdot.org] you could ask the original artist for permission to use.

Or you can just look at various [sanu.ac.yu] collections [sciencenews.org] for your own tastes.

Re:

[Seakip18 (1106315)]

A Mandelbrot set is very easy and very cool. I've always been fascinated with the set and have wondered what would be the best way to make a nice big landscape printout of it.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

I know the guy who runs fractalus.com has done some large prints of his work.

Re:Several Suggestions

[NoPantsJim (1149003)]

Sorry, I can't help but post this. Awesome song about the Mandelbrot set for those who haven't heard it.

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Mandelbrot%20Set [jonathancoulton.com]

Re:Several Suggestions

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

What about NASA?

[JonTurner (178845)]

Agreed. Show what REAL comp-sci is about:

Photos of the Apollo AGS / LEM Guidance Control control panel.
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/LM-Panel-Sept1968.jpg [ibiblio.org]
Maybe with a snippet of the source code (Luminary 131 and Colossus 249) which were written in assembly, inset in the image?? http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/hrst/archive/1701b.pdf [ibiblio.org]

2,000 15-bit words of erasable core memory and 36,000 words of read-only ("rope") memory, yet this software helped land men on the moon and got them back to earth!!

How 'bout a shot of the Mars rover, the one that was nearly lost due to a bug, then the VxWorks OS was upgraded from 65 million miles away @ the rate of 2K/sec for three days. "interplanetary roadside assistance!"
http://science.howstuffworks.com/mars-rover1.htm [howstuffworks.com]
Designed to run for 3 months, they've run for YEARS!

That is what Computer Science is all about!!

Re:Several Suggestions

[QRDeNameland (873957)]

Slashdot Story Art

I couldn't help but picture a hallway adorned with nicely framed images of goatse and tubgirl.

Re:

[Anne_Nonymous (313852)]

How about some ASCII naked ladies?

Re:Several Suggestions

[Tetsujin (103070)]

How about some ASCII naked ladies?

Actually, forget the ASCII...

Re:Several Suggestions

[linzeal (197905)]

Ada Lovelace

Here is a modern Ada Lovelace [deviantart.com] print. Would be cool to put up a woman for the dept.

Re:Several Suggestions

[John Courtland (585609)]

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 [wikipedia.org]

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.

Show some taste

[gtada (191158)]

I will vomit so hard it comes out my eye sockets if I see another CS department with M.C. Escher, rainbow-colored 3d plots, or fucking fractal art pieces. These look SHITTY and show no A) imagination nor B) taste.

Show the world that engineers have *some* creativity instead of cloning the halls of every other CS department. Even Kandinsky or another Dutch artist (besides Escher) like Mondrian would work.

Just take a second to choose pieces with less obvious and literal connections to math and computers. Maybe

Re:Several Suggestions

[lastchance_000 (847415)]

Ummm, ignore that trailing slash. Retry [wisc.edu]

Re:

[caffeinemessiah (918089)]

Here is the link that will definitively answer this thread:

Complexification [complexification.net]

Very, very beautiful visualizations of algorithmic processes and complexity -- even if you're not into "art" per se, you really should check out this site. Plus the artist offers all the code open-source. And in the interest of full disclosure, I am not the artist and don't even know the artist, although I am a huge fan.

Comics make great filler

[EvilGoodGuy (811015)]

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.

xkcd

[smallferret (946526)]

Why not just wallpaper in xkcd comics?

posters

[Middle - Adopter (906754)]

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'.

Re:posters

[Gilmoure (18428)]

Throw a challenge to the art department: Represent modern computing.

The "Oh Shit" train poster

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

http://en.easyart.com/art-prints/Maxi-Posters/Oh-Shit!-71886.html [easyart.com]

To remind people that mistakes have consequences and to think through what they are doing.

Re:The "Oh Shit" train poster

[by Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Fractals

[RobertNotBob (597987)]

How about some nice, big fractal images?

computer art

[Goeland86 (741690)]

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.

1979 Apple Pascal Syntax Poster

[icke (661710)]

http://www.pascal-central.com/pascal-syntax.html [pascal-central.com] or a picture of it here: http://pascal-central.com/images/pascalflow.jpg [pascal-central.com] You need to fix it firmly to the wall since it carries some strong type.

the two classics that come to mind...

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

...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

[donutzombie (647763)]

Dilbert everywhere. Let the students know what they can look forward to.

Fractals, maps, circuit boards

[MythoBeast (54294)]

A few suggestions:

Fractals are ALWAYS cool. Especially the Mandelbrot set.

Maps of the internet are readily available, and if you can line several of them up they can be very educational.

Find and print out a high resolution map of the concepts in Alice in Wonderland. (extra credit, harder to find)

Have someone scan in the back of a circuit board, then blow it up to poster size. It just plain looks cool.

Piet Contest?

[eldavojohn (898314)]

You could take a very interesting approach to this and employ Piet [dangermouse.net] 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 [dangermouse.net]. 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!

Tinney prints

[base3 (539820)]

Robert Tinney [tinney.net] did the covers for Byte Magazine in the late 70s/early 80s and is selling prints of some of them now.

Re:

[kaaona (252061)]

Absolutely. Robert Tinney's artwork graced the covers of Byte magazine and several computer parts catalogs during the early days of modern computing. His "Breaking the Sound Barrier", "Computer Piracy", "Seventeen Seventy-Six", "Future Past", "Transmission Lines", and "Inside IBM" are among his many timeless classics that would be very at home in a CS department.

POV-Ray

[Applekid (993327)]

There's a lot of ray-traced images from the POV-Ray galleries which closely follow not only the mathematical basis from which computing as we know it was born, but have been beautified so even those who don't know the geeky underpinnings can appreciate them... preferrably before they learn them.

A lot of them have high quality prints available, and even some free (as in beer) ones will have the original .POV file so you can render it at any resolution you see fit for whatever gargantuan dimensions you'll send to the printing office and make them cry. ;)

Re:

[Tablizer (95088)]

[POV-Ray galleries] So what you're saying is.... metallic spheres on checkerboards? ;-)

That's so 80's. Now there's pirate ships, Lochness Monsters, bonsai tree gardens, light-houses, gargoyles, etc. At this link they are purchasable as posters:

http://www.zazzle.com/products/gallery/POVcomp.asp [zazzle.com]

Another approach is the "short code contest" (link below). This is where the contestant has to limit the size of the POV code that generates the image. Along with the image, perhaps on a plaque below, you could post

Bill Gates?

[The Real Nem (793299)]

How about some nice Bill Gates [scurvydawg.com] pics?

despair.com

[confused one (671304)]

any number of options from http://despair.com/ [despair.com]

Maybe not traditional...

[should_be_linear (779431)]

I have Munch [wikimedia.org] on my wall. Very relaxing and inspiring when you are behind schedule.

Themed rooms/areas for computing pioneers

[lophophore (4087)]

I worked at DEC Spit Brook for a while... All the conference rooms there were themed on a person important to computing, for instance, the Babbage Auditorium, conference rooms for (Grace) Hopper, (Herman) Hollerith, etc. Most of the rooms were named after computing or mathematical historical people, for instance, Konrad Zuse (as I recall, there was an original painting by Zuse in that room), Ramanujan, Heisenberg, and Schroedinger (don't look inside!) and some for people who were not dead (though Grace Hopper did actually see her conference room) like Metcalfe and Boggs, Gordon Bell, Jean Sammet, etc.

Each room had a likeness of the person, one or more plexiglass plaques describing their accomplishments, and artwork related to their inventions/discoveries. It was always interesting to go into a new conference room and see who it featured and what they did.

(We had Edison, but I don't remember their being a Tesla room... Any former inhabitants of ZKO recall?)

eBay old advertisements

[TrueJim (107565)]

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.

History of programming languages

[compro01 (777531)]

http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/languageposter_0504.html [oreilly.com]

http://www.levenez.com/lang/ [levenez.com]

An instructor at my college has those running along the hallway outside his office.

awesome ....

[brunokummel (664267)]

No matter what your tastes are..you must have an AWESOME POSTER [imageshack.us]

Datawocky

[bughunter (10093)]

In my university computing lab, circa 1985, someone had posted a photocopy of a poem and illustration from the July 1982 issue of BYTE magazine.

The title of the poem was "Datawocky" [a clear satire of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"], and it had a rather surreal illustration that I am still looking for.

The infinite series of tubes has preserved the poem [skepticfiles.org], sans fictional attribution, but I can not find the illustration.

DATAWOCKY - by Jack Stack

'Twas global and the megabytes
Did gyre and gimbal on the disk
All mimsy were the prompts and codes
And the software was brisk

Beware the microchip my son
The bits, the bytes and bauds and such
Beware the CRT and shun
The qwerty keyboard's clutch

He took his self-pace book in hand
Long time the menu key he sought
Then wrestled he with the toaster drive
And sat a while in thought

Then as he sought that glitchy bug
The microchip, with gates aflame,
Came whiffling through its I/O plug
And processed as it came

Asynch, Bisynch, all protocols,
His binary went snicker snack,
He felt it crash, and with a dash
He came galumphing back

And dids't thou tame the microchip
Come interface my beamish boy
O frabjous day, Caloo! Callay!
O database, O Joy

'Twas global and the megabytes
Did gyre and gimbal on the disk
All mimsy were the prompts and codes
And the software was brisk

As a standalone poem, it's a bit insipid. But a copy of the original article, with illustration, is a work of art that I have been searching for, unsuccessfully, for years now.

Anything BUT

[Linker3000 (626634)]

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)?

Why not the works of Salvador Dali?

[jamrock (863246)]

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.

Amen. When I read the summary, my first thought was "Why SHOULD it be computer-related? Why not just art that CS majors might find interesting?" The first post suggested prints of Escher's work, which I thought quite appropriate because of their paradoxical nature, not to mention the beauty of the woodcuts, but being woo

Voronoi diagrams

[thehossman (198379)]

They're really cool when done using gradients.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram [wikipedia.org]

Code for generating them...
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=190245 [perlmonks.org]

Example...
http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~chultqui/houdini/images/heightfield_voronoi_part.png [uct.ac.za]

4-word ultimate answer

[idontgno (624372)]

Line Printer Snoopy Calendar!

Cellular Automata Fishbowl

[bughunter (10093)]

Another cool idea is kind of a "digital fishbowl" -- get an old tablet PC or iMac (or even just a digital photo frame) and have it run Golly [sourceforge.net] cases (or in the case of the photo frame, a sequence of Golly generations).

Robotic head that follows you down the hall

[TheSync (5291)]

I suggest a robotic head [t11s.com] that follows you down the hall while showering you with compliments. It will help to boost the self-esteem of the CS majors.

Or animatronic fish [t11s.com] crying out in pain. It will remind the CS majors that some people do have it worse than them.

Or a disembodied robotic hand [t11s.com] that points at you and accuses you of crimes against humanity. OK, this is just weird.

A CS theme isn't necessarily best

[supersat (639745)]

Here at the University of Washington, our department chair has spent considerable effort [washington.edu] curating our new building's art collection [washington.edu], and the results are spectacular! Instead of going for a CS theme, he chose to feature artists that have some sort of connection with the UW, which has lead to an impressive collection of artwork.

Electric Sheep

[burris (122191)]

Find a projector or a big LCD and connect it to a computer running Electric Sheep [electricsheep.org]. 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.

I enjoy the Rusty Russell 2.4 Kernel Diagram...

[Sierran (155611)]

...covered here on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. I don't know if Linuxcare still has the posters, but that post generously offers links to the Postscript, and to code to generate the imagery from kernel source (I haven't checked the links). I have this framed in my office in 36"x48" and it looks great, in my nerdy eyes.

Re:Demoralizing posters FTW

[OldeTimeGeek (725417)]

Like these [despair.com]?

I've been secretly substituting them for the motivational posters at work. heh. heh.

Re:Prof suggested this a bit ago...

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

You *might* want something that will be just a little more. . . accessible, to the general public.

In the spirit of the makers of 'Tron' and 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,' I hereby offer a VERY hearty, "EFF THE GENERAL PUBLIC!"

Ahem.