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?"
Several Suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.
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Re:Several Suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Mandelbrot%20Set [jonathancoulton.com]
Re:Several Suggestions (Score:5, Insightful)
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!!
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Re:Several Suggestions (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
Re:Several Suggestions (Score:5, Funny)
I couldn't help but picture a hallway adorned with nicely framed images of goatse and tubgirl.
That's odd (Score:2)
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How about framed photos of framed Escher prints?
"I see," said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.
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Re:Several Suggestions (Score:4, Funny)
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Here is a modern Ada Lovelace [deviantart.com] print. Would be cool to put up a woman for the dept.
Re:Several Suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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This is an example of MC Escher Moebius Strip [mcescher.com]
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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
Comics make great filler (Score:5, Informative)
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Or Brandon Bird. [brandonbird.com]
Lazy Sunday Afternoon [brandonbird.com] being a good choice.
xkcd (Score:4, Insightful)
posters (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:posters (Score:5, Interesting)
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But hey, who am I to rain on the "Asking slashdot for anything is stupid" parade
The "Oh Shit" train poster (Score:4, Interesting)
To remind people that mistakes have consequences and to think through what they are doing.
Re:The "Oh Shit" train poster (Score:5, Funny)
Fractals (Score:2)
computer art (Score:5, Informative)
1979 Apple Pascal Syntax Poster (Score:2, Funny)
the two classics that come to mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Dilbert (Score:5, Insightful)
Fractals, maps, circuit boards (Score:2)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, it'd be super cheap!
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The second was the old poster, "A human never stands so tall as when stooping to help a small computer."
Tinney prints (Score:5, Informative)
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I couldn't remember the guy's name, but I was thinking "BYTE covers".
Mod parent up!!!
POV-Ray (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of them have high quality prints available, and even some free (as in beer) ones will have the original
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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
posters of processors (Score:2)
Bill Gates? (Score:5, Funny)
How about some nice Bill Gates [scurvydawg.com] pics?
despair.com (Score:3, Interesting)
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And from the AutoMotivator [wigflip.com] comes this gem [lemonodor.com] of a poster of John McCarthy [wikipedia.org]. Oh, how I laughed...
Maybe not traditional... (Score:3, Funny)
Porn, of course... (Score:2)
See the third item here, titled "I didn't ask..." [thedailywtf.com]
MadCow.
Themed rooms/areas for computing pioneers (Score:4, Interesting)
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?)
Javvin's Posters (Score:2)
I've got their network protocols map on the wall of my office.
XKCD, of course! (Score:2)
At the bottom.
Anything by Despair Inc. (Score:2)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/exclusives/8aec/ [thinkgeek.com]
Although Dilbert is always good.
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David Em (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.davidem.com/em_gallery_page/em_gallery.html [davidem.com]
eBay old advertisements (Score:5, Interesting)
Is cheap, looks cool, looks professional, and educates you on the history of your discipline, all at the same time.
Context Free Art (Score:2)
From the Website:
Contextfreeart.org [contextfreeart.org]
Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.
Hey, NO college office is complete without... (Score:2)
History of programming languages (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.levenez.com/lang/ [levenez.com]
An instructor at my college has those running along the hallway outside his office.
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http://www.levenez.com/unix/ [levenez.com]
awesome .... (Score:5, Funny)
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"?
Datawocky (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.Hardware (Score:2)
Prof suggested this a bit ago... (Score:2, Interesting)
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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.
Anything BUT (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (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 woo
Voronoi diagrams (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Line Printer Snoopy Calendar!
Cellular Automata Fishbowl (Score:3, Interesting)
How about some nice ASCII or ANSI art? (Score:2)
Or you could print Natalie Portman and hot grits on a dot matrix printer...or goatse.. It's up to you..
Robotic head that follows you down the hall (Score:3, Funny)
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.
The Utah Teapot (Score:2)
Stonewolf
Vintage hardware posters (Score:2)
Screw the R2D2 (Score:2)
How do I get that red Zaku that is in their office?
Better yet, how do I get a powered Zaku similar to the one in the office!
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Man, I placed this in the wrong article.
That being said, it would still be pretty cool to have a Zaku in a CS department. Give them something to inspire those evil geniuses to build one day. Hell of a lot better motivator than dilbert wallpaper.
Try YayArt (Score:2)
Blinkenlights (Score:2)
A CS theme isn't necessarily best (Score:4, Interesting)
A more interesting/generic suggestion. (Score:2)
Electric Sheep (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Map of the Internet (Score:2)
However, if you have access to a reliable printing shop (and being a university department, you should) consider printing and/or re-rendering one of these visualizations [opte.org] for your wall.
CGI of course (Score:2)
http://flickr.com/photos/devinmoore/sets/72157601859714574/ [flickr.com]
(gratuitous plug)
To hell with the walls, they are unimportant (Score:2)
Where would you be without the floor?
Nowhere, I tell you. Because without floors, we would not have carpets. Without carpets we would not have tapestries. And without tapestries, we would have no need for a 19th-century card-programmable automated loom -- Jacquard's Loom.
Now, without Jacquard's Loom, Babbage would not have come up with the Analytical Engine (at least not when he did), and without that, we would not have had Ada Lovelace's foray into the CS field.
And without Ada Lovelace's sh
David Em (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Em
http://www.davidem.com/
I'm not sure if there are posters of his work, but digital frames might be a good answer.
Depictions of CS History (Score:2)
pimpin' ain't easy: (Score:2)
I developed a system to make pretty ice blue translucent sculptures, by extending Conway's Game of Life, but plotting "time" in the 3rd dimension: (in Java "Processing" language)
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ [kisrael.com] is the basic version,
http://kisrael.com/features/java/conwayice2/ [kisrael.com] is a bigger version that lets you set the initial seeding options.
Rene Magritte for starters... (Score:2)
In particular his "Treachery of Images" [wikipedia.org]
Escher of course is traditional, but how about fonts and typographic art?
How about Symbolist artists? [wikipedia.org]
Gustav Klimt [wikipedia.org]
And Jan Toorop [wikipedia.org]
Of course, you could just take two cotton reels and a hot glue gun and put dabs of glue on the walls of the corridor and stick the cotton to it. At the far end of the corridor have a finishing line, the reels and a name plate with the words "Thread Race"
Curta Calculator poster (Score:2)
I have one of these posters. It looks pretty cool, and is mathematics-related:
http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm#Curta-Poster [vcalc.net]Don't get cute (Score:2)
Get the engineering department to help (Score:2)
Posters are boring, if they don't have a chip embedded in them why bother? This is a question on slashdot and people don't come up with truly geeky solutions, what's up with people!
Why not get some friendly EE's to help wire up some framed LCD monitors so you can have computerized art.
eBay (Score:2)
I enjoy the Rusty Russell 2.4 Kernel Diagram... (Score:3, Interesting)
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When doing this for a computer programming area, we wrote a simple downsampler to ~32 colors which split it across several columns, then created lineprinter values for each darkness value, using lots of overstriking for the dark areas. A pic of Einstein came out looking remarkably good, especially since it had to be viewed from a distance. (We stapled it to the ceiling
Re:Demoralizing posters FTW (Score:4, Funny)
I've been secretly substituting them for the motivational posters at work. heh. heh.
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