Computer Art For a CS Dept Office? 366
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?"
xkcd (Score:4, Insightful)
posters (Score:4, Insightful)
Dilbert (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Several Suggestions (Score:5, Insightful)
David Em (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.davidem.com/em_gallery_page/em_gallery.html [davidem.com]
Tufte! (Score:2, Insightful)
Napoleon's March [edwardtufte.com]
A big part of software design is towards the ultimate goal of displaying data and information in a clear, informative manner. So why not display one of the finest examples of that?
And who cares that it's not "high tech"?
Ada (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Prof suggested this a bit ago... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Why not the works of Salvador Dali? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 woodcuts, they're only going to be black-and-white (or grayscale). Then I thought: why not the works of Salvador Dali? Dali's technical brilliance as an illustrator was the foundation of his success as a surrealist. The bizarre, almost photo-realistic objects set in meticulously painted dreamscapes is to me a perfect metaphor for the unimaginable that may spring from the mundane, of the beauty and power inherent in tapestries of logic, woven from strands of 1's and 0's.
Everyone knows the drooping clocks of The Persistence of Memory [virtualdali.com], but what about the use of negative space to illustrate the subject of Invisible Afghan [virtualdali.com]; or his habit of juxtaposing objects to create more images, as in Swans Reflecting Elephants [virtualdali.com]? Dali produced about 1,500 paintings in his long career, and a good place to see a sample of his work is Virtual Dali [virtualdali.com]. I think that while CS departments must ensure that graduates know the fundamentals, they should also be encouraging them to think outside the bounds of the ordinary. Dali's works reflect this conviction, in my opinion.
I just went back over the comments and saw that someone suggested Dali's "The Swallow's Tail". Nice to know that somebody else also thought about Dali.
What about NASA? (Score:4, Insightful)
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!!
Show some taste (Score:3, Insightful)
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 try a tasteful theme: look for classical examples of art that utilize the Golden Ratio. Perhaps try hanging a one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective paintings next to each other (but not some overly-complicated, geeky-as-fuck six-point perspective) and see how many people notice the theme. Art is about the joy of discovery.
BTW, a little color coordination would go a LOOONG way. Try to match your pieces instead of throwing up (and I do mean "throwing up") a crapload of clashing pieces.
IF you hang up even one Escher, fractal, 3d plot, polyhedron or god forbid Celtic knot you're fucking fired. If you don't like Kandinsky, fine. But don't hang up the CS department cliches. Show some depth.
Re:Several Suggestions (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Fractal art: this was really big in the 80s and early 90s. 'Fess up. Doesn't it remind you of women with big hair in pink polyester jackets with wide shoulder pads?
2. M.C. Escher: this was also a fad a while ago, although you could argue it's got some staying power.
3. Procedurally-generated art, like the stuff made by Piet (below): this may also be "of a certain time".
4. Povray: the first ray-traced images contained lots of floating glassy spheres (it's easy to code), and looked cool. Now they look cheesy. I've seen lots of more complex povray scenes that I like, but I suspect that 10 years from now every video game will be able contain scenes like it, so the poster on the wall will seem a lot less remarkable.
5. Paintings about computers: someone here suggested commissioning an artist to paint an impression of computer science. This seems like a good idea, but remember that we computer people are snobs. Folks will always find something wrong with the work, some irritating thing that the artist (an outsider to our field) sees in CS, which we find incorrect or, at least, dated. It reminds me of a mural commissioned for the engineering building at my school, back in 1948. It's full of references to the threat of atomic war, and of the benign possibilities of atomic power. To me, it reeks of postwar angst.
So, what to do? What to do?
How about getting some real art up on that wall? You could commission an artist to paint something original, with no reference to CS in particular. Of course, art is subject to trends too, and the artist might give you something that future CS students, though they be non-artists, would sense belonged to a certain decade. Not to mention artists charge real money for real work.
Better to get something that everybody already knows is old but which most people like. Maybe some reproductions of Michelangelo's Sistine chapel, or some Renoir or Van Gogh. Something that has lasted a long time, because it speaks of some idea that is eternal, like religion, nature, human development (all those things that sound like cliches once you write them down). I personally like images by Annigoni: he's a 20th-century realist painter, many of whose images convey a sense of mystery. But that's my taste, and may not be in fashion ten years from now.