5 ms·

What’s Hot in the Art World? Algorithms

64 points by alexis 11y ago

sp332 11y ago
There's got to be some interesting copyright licensing discussions going on there. Like when Don Knuth declared in 2004 that MacPaint was "the best program ever written", but it took until 2010 to convince Apple to release the source code. https://web.archive.org/web/20100721233205/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ByteOfTheApple/blog/archives/2010/07/apple_donates_macpaint_source_code_to_computer_history_museum.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100721233205/http://www.busine...
wanderingstan 11y ago
This is good, interesting news. Many years ago I did some work combining calligraphy and code, but found that art-people didn't appreciate algorithms and code-people didn't appreciate art. Here's a card I made for a friend who said that rc4 was "the most important algorithm that will fit on one page": http://i.imgur.com/TUeJS7y.png http://i.imgur.com/TUeJS7y.png
- darkmighty 11y ago
  Pardon the bluntness, but I think you're missing the point. Algorithms have artistic value for what they represent -- and not because of the font, programming language or even social language they're written on. It's like taking the famous formula "E=mc²" and write it in a cryptic font to make it 'artful'. For me, the beauty is in the simple (and amazing!) meaning that mass and energy are equivalent. Making the formula legible and neat highlights that, in my opinion.
  - wanderingstan 11y ago
    No pardon necessary. I wasn't trying to make a point about what the intersection of algorithm and art should look like (and certainly not saying that my doodle is the right way!), just saying that I'm happy that these worlds are becoming aware of each other. I think this will be fruitful. We can agree to disagree on legibility and what is 'artful' for algorithms much like art fans of the last century wrestled with abstract art. I enjoy the art world precisely because it is so rule-less and undefined, unlike my day-to-day coding.
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      Sorry to be negative, but as someone who considers myself both an art person and a code person, I don’t find the example very compelling as either art or code or as a union of the two. Your friends’ lack of enthusiasm for it doesn’t necessarily prove anything about their (in)ability to appreciate other fields. For contrast, I consider many of the links here to be examples of great art (and great exposition) related to code/formal models: http://conceptviz.github.io/ http://conceptviz.github.io/
      - rquantz 11y ago
        This is silly, there's plenty of art that takes a subject and renders it in an incongruous medium. It is usually not productive to criticize art for not achieving something it is not trying to achieve. I'm not taking a side on the question of whether the code calligraphy is good or not, but your argument that it's bad because it doesn't follow the particular model that you think is the correct intersection between art and data does not hold water.
        jacobolus 11y ago
        I didn’t say it’s “bad” in any objective sense. I said I don’t personally find it very compelling, and it’s in my opinion very thin evidence on which to ground his sweeping statement: “[I] found that art-people didn't appreciate algorithms and code-people didn't appreciate art.”
  - adrianm 11y ago
    I don't see a meaningful distinction between what makes a qrpff tie "art" and what makes calligraphic code "not art". He even named the piece aptly: "the most important algorithm that will fit on one page".
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Thing is, "E=mc²" is already a symbolic representation of the relationship, on two levels - choice of units and dimensionality, and also use of arbitrary letter shapes to represent quantities. When you spend all day hacking code with a text editor it's easy to forget that code is really a linear list of symbols, and the text version of the code is just a human-editable representation of it. So it's funny to think art buyers have persuaded themselves they can "buy" an algorithm, or that a printout of an algorithm is the same as the algorithm itself - and not just one of infinitely many possible representations of it.
  - dagw 11y ago
    Algorithms have artistic value for what they represent -- and not because of the font That is true for all great art though. The Art is not the pretty picture but what the picture represents and symbolises, the pretty picture is just the medium used to try to present that.
    - darkmighty 11y ago
      I believe that, to some degree, we can compatimentalize the beauty in the representation and the content. Take a discernment test which I would call a "substitution test": if you replace the content and the artistic value is more or less unchanged, I claim the representation is the highlight; if replacing the content destroys the values I claim the content is the highlight. For example, for a picture of Monet, if you swap the scenery for another similar one while maintaining the style not all value is lost. However, if you take E=MC^2 and replace that with B=CD^3, the value vanishes. I claim that algorithms have a great value in terms "content", and picturing it in illegible text highlights instead a "representation" (since you could replace that code with any other algo) -- missing the point.
      - wanderingstan 11y ago
        Since I'm stuck late coding tonight, a little art talk is fun. :) Representation and content are not so easily separated. (Marcel Duchamp is all over this.) And to the extent that this division exists, they can combine in a cumulative way; great representation with great content. My field, calligraphy, is keenly aware of the "content problem". (My humble works[1]) Are the great Chinese calligraphers "missing the point" of the poems in their works when the resulting script is illegible to most? Especially in the west, it seems people take writing and letters so much for granted that they assume the only appropriate function is for them to be easily interpreted. (Before abstract art, people held similar ideas that the purpose of painting was to easily convey what the artist had seen.) Perhaps in a similar vein, you're saying that the only appropriate use of algorithms in a piece of art is for them to be communicated clearly and faithfully? We are in agreement that algorithms have great value in terms of content. And I'm excited that the art world is growing aware of the "value" of algorithms. It's been my impression that the art world was stuck too long on the physical forms of computing technology (the cases, the monitors, the phones, the wires, the blinking lights), so it's exciting to see how artists will interpret the beauty of algorithms themselves. Okay, now back to coding. EDIT: Some beautiful Chinese calligraphy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calligraphy#/media/File:Mi_Fu-On_Calligraphy.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calligraphy#/media/Fil... [1] http://instagram.com/wanderingstan/ http://instagram.com/wanderingstan/
- ortuna 11y ago
  I have a side project you might find interesting (http://commits.io http://commits.io). It takes any git hub repo and creates a poster out of it. Then it overlays an image of your choice and colors each letter to represent that image, pixelating it it.
  - wanderingstan 11y ago
    So cool!
- wslh 11y ago
  You can take a look at Leon Ferrari Calligraphy Art [1] [1] https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=leon+ferrari+calligraphy https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=leon+ferrari+calligraphy
  - wanderingstan 11y ago
    How have I not seen his work before?! I love it.
tromp 11y ago
Lambda diagrams (http://tromp.github.io/cl/diagrams.html http://tromp.github.io/cl/diagrams.html) offer an artistic depiction of algorithms. Here is, for instance, a prime number sieve: ───────────────────────────────────────────────── ┬─┬───────────────────────────────────┬──── ────┬ │ │ ┬─┬ ────┬─┬────────────────────── ┼───┬ ┬───┼ │ │ └─┤ ────┼─┼───────────────────┬── ┼───┼ │ ┬ │ │ │ │ ┬───┼─┼───────────────────┼── ┼─┬─┼ │ ┼ │ │ │ │ │ ─ ┼─┼─┬─────┬──── ──────┼─┬ │ ├─┘ └─┤ │ │ │ │ │ ┬ └─┤ │ ┬─┬ ┼─┬─┬ ──┬───┼─┼ ├─┘ ├─┘ │ │ │ └─┤ └─┤ └─┤ │ ├─┘ ──┼─┬─┼─┼ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─┘ ┬─┼─┼─┼─┼ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─┘ └─┤ │ ├─┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ └───┤ │ ├─┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─────────┘ │ │ │ │ │ ├─────────┘ │ │ │ │ └───┤ │ │ │ │ ├───────────────────────────┘ │ │ ├───────┘ │ └─┤ │ └───────────────────────────────────────────┘
- ola 11y ago
  Very beautiful, the notation looks similar to Frege's concept script https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/scav/frege/frege.html https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/scav/frege/fr...
- Dwolb 11y ago
  Is it well-known that these diagrams look like VLSI layouts?
- drewblaisdell 11y ago
  I would pay to have this mounted on my wall.
Dewie3 11y ago
> Simply put, an algorithm is a procedure for a process, "Procedure for a process". That's very vague. Might as well write "method of doing".
- javert 11y ago
  Method to compute a result. More technically, method to produce or alter a piece of data. (Because we should not neglect algorithms that operate on data structures.)
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    An infinite loop is an algorithm. No result required.
abecedarius 11y ago
https://www.artsy.net/auction/the-algorithm-auction https://www.artsy.net/auction/the-algorithm-auction seems to be the auction in question.
prawn 11y ago
A friend of mine won a poster design competition 10 or so years ago with an entry that was scripted in Flash (ActionScript, or whatever it was). From memory, he had a few other pieces created in the same way, playing around with various functions. Ahead of his time!
damian2000 11y ago
I thought this was going to be art generated by algorithms... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

64 points by alexis 11y ago

sp332 11y ago

There's got to be some interesting copyright licensing discussions going on there. Like when Don Knuth declared in 2004 that MacPaint was "the best program ever written", but it took until 2010 to convince Apple to release the source code. https://web.archive.org/web/20100721233205/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ByteOfTheApple/blog/archives/2010/07/apple_donates_macpaint_source_code_to_computer_history_museum.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100721233205/http://www.busine...

wanderingstan 11y ago

This is good, interesting news. Many years ago I did some work combining calligraphy and code, but found that art-people didn't appreciate algorithms and code-people didn't appreciate art. Here's a card I made for a friend who said that rc4 was "the most important algorithm that will fit on one page": http://i.imgur.com/TUeJS7y.png http://i.imgur.com/TUeJS7y.png

darkmighty 11y ago
Pardon the bluntness, but I think you're missing the point. Algorithms have artistic value for what they represent -- and not because of the font, programming language or even social language they're written on. It's like taking the famous formula "E=mc²" and write it in a cryptic font to make it 'artful'. For me, the beauty is in the simple (and amazing!) meaning that mass and energy are equivalent. Making the formula legible and neat highlights that, in my opinion.
- wanderingstan 11y ago
  No pardon necessary. I wasn't trying to make a point about what the intersection of algorithm and art should look like (and certainly not saying that my doodle is the right way!), just saying that I'm happy that these worlds are becoming aware of each other. I think this will be fruitful. We can agree to disagree on legibility and what is 'artful' for algorithms much like art fans of the last century wrestled with abstract art. I enjoy the art world precisely because it is so rule-less and undefined, unlike my day-to-day coding.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    Sorry to be negative, but as someone who considers myself both an art person and a code person, I don’t find the example very compelling as either art or code or as a union of the two. Your friends’ lack of enthusiasm for it doesn’t necessarily prove anything about their (in)ability to appreciate other fields. For contrast, I consider many of the links here to be examples of great art (and great exposition) related to code/formal models: http://conceptviz.github.io/ http://conceptviz.github.io/
    - rquantz 11y ago
      This is silly, there's plenty of art that takes a subject and renders it in an incongruous medium. It is usually not productive to criticize art for not achieving something it is not trying to achieve. I'm not taking a side on the question of whether the code calligraphy is good or not, but your argument that it's bad because it doesn't follow the particular model that you think is the correct intersection between art and data does not hold water.
      - jacobolus 11y ago
        I didn’t say it’s “bad” in any objective sense. I said I don’t personally find it very compelling, and it’s in my opinion very thin evidence on which to ground his sweeping statement: “[I] found that art-people didn't appreciate algorithms and code-people didn't appreciate art.”
- adrianm 11y ago
  I don't see a meaningful distinction between what makes a qrpff tie "art" and what makes calligraphic code "not art". He even named the piece aptly: "the most important algorithm that will fit on one page".
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Thing is, "E=mc²" is already a symbolic representation of the relationship, on two levels - choice of units and dimensionality, and also use of arbitrary letter shapes to represent quantities. When you spend all day hacking code with a text editor it's easy to forget that code is really a linear list of symbols, and the text version of the code is just a human-editable representation of it. So it's funny to think art buyers have persuaded themselves they can "buy" an algorithm, or that a printout of an algorithm is the same as the algorithm itself - and not just one of infinitely many possible representations of it.
- dagw 11y ago
  Algorithms have artistic value for what they represent -- and not because of the font That is true for all great art though. The Art is not the pretty picture but what the picture represents and symbolises, the pretty picture is just the medium used to try to present that.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    I believe that, to some degree, we can compatimentalize the beauty in the representation and the content. Take a discernment test which I would call a "substitution test": if you replace the content and the artistic value is more or less unchanged, I claim the representation is the highlight; if replacing the content destroys the values I claim the content is the highlight. For example, for a picture of Monet, if you swap the scenery for another similar one while maintaining the style not all value is lost. However, if you take E=MC^2 and replace that with B=CD^3, the value vanishes. I claim that algorithms have a great value in terms "content", and picturing it in illegible text highlights instead a "representation" (since you could replace that code with any other algo) -- missing the point.
    - wanderingstan 11y ago
      Since I'm stuck late coding tonight, a little art talk is fun. :) Representation and content are not so easily separated. (Marcel Duchamp is all over this.) And to the extent that this division exists, they can combine in a cumulative way; great representation with great content. My field, calligraphy, is keenly aware of the "content problem". (My humble works[1]) Are the great Chinese calligraphers "missing the point" of the poems in their works when the resulting script is illegible to most? Especially in the west, it seems people take writing and letters so much for granted that they assume the only appropriate function is for them to be easily interpreted. (Before abstract art, people held similar ideas that the purpose of painting was to easily convey what the artist had seen.) Perhaps in a similar vein, you're saying that the only appropriate use of algorithms in a piece of art is for them to be communicated clearly and faithfully? We are in agreement that algorithms have great value in terms of content. And I'm excited that the art world is growing aware of the "value" of algorithms. It's been my impression that the art world was stuck too long on the physical forms of computing technology (the cases, the monitors, the phones, the wires, the blinking lights), so it's exciting to see how artists will interpret the beauty of algorithms themselves. Okay, now back to coding. EDIT: Some beautiful Chinese calligraphy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calligraphy#/media/File:Mi_Fu-On_Calligraphy.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calligraphy#/media/Fil... [1] http://instagram.com/wanderingstan/ http://instagram.com/wanderingstan/
ortuna 11y ago
I have a side project you might find interesting (http://commits.io http://commits.io). It takes any git hub repo and creates a poster out of it. Then it overlays an image of your choice and colors each letter to represent that image, pixelating it it.
- wanderingstan 11y ago
  So cool!
wslh 11y ago
You can take a look at Leon Ferrari Calligraphy Art [1] [1] https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=leon+ferrari+calligraphy https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=leon+ferrari+calligraphy
- wanderingstan 11y ago
  How have I not seen his work before?! I love it.

tromp 11y ago

Lambda diagrams (http://tromp.github.io/cl/diagrams.html http://tromp.github.io/cl/diagrams.html) offer an artistic depiction of algorithms. Here is, for instance, a prime number sieve: ───────────────────────────────────────────────── ┬─┬───────────────────────────────────┬──── ────┬ │ │ ┬─┬ ────┬─┬────────────────────── ┼───┬ ┬───┼ │ │ └─┤ ────┼─┼───────────────────┬── ┼───┼ │ ┬ │ │ │ │ ┬───┼─┼───────────────────┼── ┼─┬─┼ │ ┼ │ │ │ │ │ ─ ┼─┼─┬─────┬──── ──────┼─┬ │ ├─┘ └─┤ │ │ │ │ │ ┬ └─┤ │ ┬─┬ ┼─┬─┬ ──┬───┼─┼ ├─┘ ├─┘ │ │ │ └─┤ └─┤ └─┤ │ ├─┘ ──┼─┬─┼─┼ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─┘ ┬─┼─┼─┼─┼ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─┘ └─┤ │ ├─┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ └───┤ │ ├─┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├─────────┘ │ │ │ │ │ ├─────────┘ │ │ │ │ └───┤ │ │ │ │ ├───────────────────────────┘ │ │ ├───────┘ │ └─┤ │ └───────────────────────────────────────────┘

ola 11y ago
Very beautiful, the notation looks similar to Frege's concept script https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/scav/frege/frege.html https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/scav/frege/fr...
Dwolb 11y ago
Is it well-known that these diagrams look like VLSI layouts?
drewblaisdell 11y ago
I would pay to have this mounted on my wall.

Dewie3 11y ago

> Simply put, an algorithm is a procedure for a process, "Procedure for a process". That's very vague. Might as well write "method of doing".

javert 11y ago
Method to compute a result. More technically, method to produce or alter a piece of data. (Because we should not neglect algorithms that operate on data structures.)
- SixSigma 11y ago
  An infinite loop is an algorithm. No result required.

abecedarius 11y ago

https://www.artsy.net/auction/the-algorithm-auction https://www.artsy.net/auction/the-algorithm-auction seems to be the auction in question.

prawn 11y ago

A friend of mine won a poster design competition 10 or so years ago with an entry that was scripted in Flash (ActionScript, or whatever it was). From memory, he had a few other pieces created in the same way, playing around with various functions. Ahead of his time!

damian2000 11y ago

I thought this was going to be art generated by algorithms... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art