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?"

The "Oh Shit" train poster

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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:Several Suggestions

[Seakip18]

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.

the two classics that come to mind...

[Tumbleweed]

...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.

Piet Contest?

[eldavojohn]

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!

POV-Ray

[Applekid]

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. ;)

check this out

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.contextfreeart.org

despair.com

[confused one]

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

Themed rooms/areas for computing pioneers

[lophophore]

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?)

Re:Several Suggestions

[lastchance_000]

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

eBay old advertisements

[TrueJim]

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.

Datawocky

[bughunter]

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.

Prof suggested this a bit ago...

[CFBMoo1]

Back when I was in college he suggested putting 'Computer Science' in binary on the floor tiles in the hall way.

Anything BUT

[Linker3000]

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)?

Voronoi diagrams

[thehossman]

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]

Cellular Automata Fishbowl

[bughunter]

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).

Re:posters

[Gilmoure]

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

Art made from traveling salesman tours

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/tsp/ [uwaterloo.ca]

Re:Several Suggestions

[linzeal]

Ada Lovelace

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

A CS theme isn't necessarily best

[supersat]

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]

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.

Re:Several Suggestions

[strength_of_10_men]

Or you can combine traditional artwork but redone in a "geeky" way. Take something famous and recognizable and Rasterbate [homokaasu.org] it.

I enjoy the Rusty Russell 2.4 Kernel Diagram...

[Sierran]

...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:POV-Ray

[Tablizer]

[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 the POV code (equation) that generates it. That would show the both beauty and the technology (math) behind it.

http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/exhibition/scc3/final/ [uwa.edu.au]

Sure, the "short code" contest is a bit closer to the "silver sphere on a checkered board" kind of themes, but that alone does not make it bad, especially if you can show the equation with it. Show both: the complex ones (no plague) and the short-code ones with equation plagues.