Commonality between Painting and Programming

My girlfriend is an Art major and is currently taking a painting class and I am a CS major. We were talking the other day about the similarities between how she goes about painting and how I go about writing a program. When I first start to work on a program I normally begin by getting a pencil and paper. I work out how I want to represent the functionality of the program’s purpose in code, what things go where and how different objects relate to each other (assuming an object-oriented language). You need to know what every object knows and how will it be interacting with the other objects. This is all to accomplish the program’s end goal, whatever that may be. Now if we think about a painting. When have a concept that you want to get across through painting, normally you do not just start painting and hope it all works out on the fly. The artist will do some sketches to figure out the composition, colors and shapes of the painting. The artist will need to think through how the colors relate and affect each other and how they impact the shapes. Similarly figuring out how all the objects will relate to each other a painter will need to understand before hand how he or she wants all the elements of the painting to relate and affect one another in order to get across the original concept. If you think about it more you realize the process methods for both these things are very similar.

Program Design: Trading game

I want to talk about a game I am currently developing and about how I generally approach more complicated programs. I’ve always really enjoyed playing market and trading based games, games like “Taipan!” and “Tradewinds”. The basic game concept behind these games is you buy products at one location and then travel to another in hopes of selling it for a profit. Seems very simple and even boring but add some potential challenges and somewhat controlled random prices and it can become a very fun and interesting game. I want to start my game buy having the same game concept at its core but then I want to creatively expand the game and add more complexity. This leads into my next topic. How do I write code without knowing where exactly the game design is headed?

            The answer to the question above has two parts. One is you should be brainstorming and have a vague idea of stuff you want to add later in the game and you can plan for them. The second and most important is to program you code in such a way that it handles general problems and not one exact problem.  For example if you are looping through a list and you know the list has 5 elements in it you can just hard code the loop to iterate 5 times. Now what would happen if the size of your list changes, which often happen in almost every program? Your loop would end up breaking your code. A better way to handle this would be to dynamically determine the size of your list before starting the loop. This way your loop will never break at least for having the wrong number of iterations. Everything in a program that is subject to change should be generated dynamically when used to avoid problems. When I program I am always thinking about all the different cases and outcomes of the code I am writing and I write it so my code can handle them. No one gets this right the first time but that’s what debugging is for. So my point is think about the future of your code while writing it not just how can I get this to work for my current circumstances.

Floating Lantern Festival and Scale

            This festival is visually stunning to me. It is a great example of how something can be really spectacular if a lot of people can work together to create something beautiful and meaningful. Thousands of people gather together and launch hot-air lanterns into the night sky all about the same time. I think just for this is worth doing just for the visual alone and the sense of tradition but it also has a spiritual and personal aspect. The lanterns can represent a prayer being sent or it can be the bad things floating away. Whatever view you have on spirituality somehow something like this can make you feel like it must be a really amazing feeling to experience being there.

            Branching from a statement that I made above that it is really cool when a lot of people gather together to accomplish a common goal. I want to discuss scale and how that affects a piece of art. For example have one guy randomly start dancing in a crowd and almost none will even notice and the few that do will probably not care in the slightest, but if half the people in a crowded area stop what they are doing and start a choreographed dance. Pretty much everyone will notice and take some sort of interest in it. Scale seems to matter. Another example is the Mona Lisa. You see all the pictures of it online and it is a very well done painting but when you see it in person and it is so small and you cant see it up close and it seems to lose it’s wow factor. Is big always better though? I personally cannot think of an example where a piece of art is only better as it gets smaller. There very well might be though, but scale does play a large role in how impressive people are with a piece of art.

Image link:

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/chiang-mai-lantern-festival

Is Art Original?

            Some people say that nowadays any art that is created is referencing something in art history. The question I am posing is more saying “Is art purely original?” I think it is pretty obvious that a lot of art has original ideas and perspectives, but is everything about the artwork original. By original I mean the artist draws the information only from himself or herself. I am struggling with this idea as I write this. It seems impossible for anything to be truly original. It makes me want to go back to whatever the first creation happened. If everything that we humans create in our world is based on some past information at some point in the past we something would have to be created without any past information. I don’t want to get into my own philosophical believes and such but it is an interesting question. Is it possible that there was never an initial creation? If so then it should be possible for us now to have a truly original idea and creation. I would argue that art is not purely original work; some credit is always due to someone else or someone else’s work that inspired them. Would a piece of art that was inspired by a random computer generation be original? Is a computer random generation different than being inspired by a person? Is it different than being inspired by nature? So I guess the real question is “Does what inspires you change the work’s originality?”

Beethoven piano sonata in E-flat major, Op. 7

I write this as I listen to the piece shown in the title. As you can tell by the title of this post I want to talk about classical music. Specifically I want to talk about my thoughts on classical music from the background of knowing nothing about it. I should also mention that I’ve had two roommates that are piano performance majors so I have had a reasonable amount of exposure to the music and have had several conversations about it with them. The definition of classical music is intellectual music from what I know. Now from my understanding this means that classical music is music that is composed with music theory concepts in mind and with a good deal of thought going into what goes where and when. We all know what classical music sounds like. For people like me most classical music sounds fairly similar.

I want to talk about how or if classical music can become more popular with the general public. The main drawback is that most people cannot appreciate the music for the full value. We can appreciate it for how it sounds and if we like it or not but that’s pretty much it. We cannot understand why it sounds like something or why this sound follows the next one. So we can never fully understand the full picture. How would this become more popular? One answer for me is for classical music to be taught in the k-12 school system. So by the time a student becomes of college age they could listen to a piece of music and point out some of the basic concepts and maybe ideas of the piece. If it is not taught to kids then I personally cannot see how this will become more popular other then maybe hipsters will make it popular for a time.

Comparing Two Paintings

I wanted to discuss and compare two paintings that my girlfriend has done. At the moment I cannot think of a way to show you them because she does not want them out on the Internet where the image could be stolen. I will describe them. The first is a painting of an alligator smashing a violin, just the head of the alligator and the violin smashing into a bunch of pieces.  The style is realistic looking. The second painting is a mix of abstract ideas and concrete images. It has a really cool and colorful background using a bunch of different methods for applying the paint. For the actual image she has a bunch of animal figures based on cave paintings. When I saw both of these paintings side by side something interesting that I thought of was bipolar quality of these two paintings. The alligator one is painted to look realist. You can see the weight and you could imagine it in a 3D space very easily, but it is smashing a violin. This is not something that happens in real life. It is realism in a fiction setting. The other painting is not very realistic looking with all the crazy colors and abstract shapes, the cave painting of the animal figures looks like it could be something that is on a cave somewhere in the real world. One painting is realistic with a fictional scene and the other is abstract looking but with a scene that looks like it could be realistic.

Personal Art Experience

I would like this blog post to be about my personal experience with Art. Growing up I was exposed to art but just the technical side of art. I toke art classes and learned how to draw and basic things of this nature, like most kids. But it wasn’t until college that I started to understand more of what Art is and why it is important to us. I took an art education course here more sophomore year and that was really interesting to me. It was cool learning about a lot of the influential pieces of art and what they meant and how they changed how others did and thought about things. It was a new experience for me thinking about art theory and the more academic and intellectual side of art. Also my girlfriend that I got in college is an Art major. I’ve learned a lot about how to think about art from her and how art can depict our emotions. She has told me stories about students starting to cry as they present their piece. She did a painting about her grandparents dying and I got to see all the emotion behind the painting and how the painting helped her express it and be able to move on. I’ve heard the question quite a few times in college, “why is art important?”. Before college I'm not sure I would have had a very good answer. I probably would have said just for ascetic value and bland things like that. Now I would say art is a way for humans to express things that we cannot say with words and to get people to communicate and interact. I think most people would agree that personal relationships and interacting with other people is one of the most important things of our lives. I would agree with this. So if art gets people to have this interaction then I would say that art is incredibly important to us as humans.

Video Games: Single player vs. Multiplayer

I want to compare how a single player experience in video games is different to a multiplayer game experience. In a single player game the focus tends to be more on a good story line and good visuals and nice looking cut scenes. In a multiplayer game the focus is more on the game play and how the different players can interact with each other. Single player is more ascetics based and multiplayer is more functionality based. Of course both need good ascetics and good game play but this is a way to separate them.  I want to compare these types of games to artistic minded people and computational minded people. Single player games need more artists to design the story and how to make the game convey certain feel through the visuals. Multiplayer games need more computational thinkers to design how you play the game and then how to implement it. So with regards to video games being art, one might say single player games are more likely to be art than multiplayer games. In my own experience player both of these types of games, I would say obviously this question depends on one’s definition of art. If you consider sports to be art then you might say multiplayer games are also art but if you say purely interacting with other people is not art then you might say single player games are the only type of video games that are art.

YouTube and Changing Entertainment Industry

I watch YouTube videos pretty much everyday and it is, for me, where I get most of my video entertainment. What I want to compare and discuss is the two mediums of video entertainment: Television and the Internet. Until the Internet came around television was pretty much the sole source for video entertainment. There was no other place to watch a video. In the beginning the technology for making videos was expensive and not available to the average person. Personal camcorders came around as early as the 50’s but it did not really explode until the digital camcorder came to be in the mid 90’s. Digital storage and technology made it very easy for the average person to experiment and mess around with what you could do with a video camera. If we look at television the viewer only has a small about of variety but high quality. And mainly is based on fictional characters that people enjoyed finding out about. Now if we look at YouTube or the Internet video world. There is an insane amount of variety and quality ranging from very high to incredible low. And is mainly based on real people and events that happen on a personal level and viewers enjoy getting to know someone that is a real living person. I do not think either style of entertainment will be going away anytime soon. But if we want to talk about television and the Internet in terms of a method of distribution of the videos then I think we can say almost certainly that the Internet is quickly taking over television. Whether or not television will ever go away completely is hard to say but I think we can see just from the current rates that Internet will soon be the very dominant form of video distribution. Just to through in a little but about art. I think that YouTube has been an amazing outlet for creativity to flourish. It’s amazing that I get to live through this very exciting time and see the huge explosion of stuff because of the Internet.

The Singularity

I wanted to discuss the idea of the Singularity, specifically technological singularity. The singularity is refereeing to a point in time where a machine or something created by humans begin to start improving themselves without human direct involvement. This is thought of as an “intellectual explosion” where no one can predict what would happen after the fact. Some people think or have reasoned that the singularity will happen in the 21^st century. Ray Kurzweil is the author of the book, “The Singularity is Near” and he predicts that it will happen in the year 2045. My personal opinion on this event is that there is not enough evidence to say we know this will happen at some point in the future or that it is even possible, but of course it is a very interesting possibility. The idea of humans writing lines of code that could then write original lines of code on its own seems very bizarre. To turn this to an artistic point of view, it would be interesting if a bunch of computer scientists and artist got together and tried to come up with how they think this super intelligent machines would create art if they would create any at all. Would they realize the need for art and expression of feeling or would they create purely based on functional needs? It would be a very interesting discussion between very computational thinkers and very artist thinkers. That would actually be a really cool thought project, to come up with an idea or prediction on how the machines would handle the idea of art.