Assignment 1 (Abstract Piece Mimicry with Processing)

I chose a piece by Josef Albers called Gitterbild. It was made in 1921. It is a combination of glass, iron latticework, and bronze wire.
The main reason I like this piece and the reason it is in the MOMA exhibition is because of the color. You can really see how smart the original position of the squares are when you start shuffling them around. I have shuffled them around a lot of times and none of the other arrangements have looked near as good. It really shows that he knew what he was doing with his color. There is no real shape that you can make out of the squares so it allows the eye to focus more on the color. Initially I didn't know it was made of glass but knowing now it makes the piece more impressive to me. In the new realm of digital art it is hard to tell how much work a person put into their piece unless they tell you. With a piece like this one you know how much work he must have put in to making the glass and carefully putting it all together. It shows the physical skill as well as his amazing understanding of color theory. In fact he later became  a teacher and had a great influence on color theory.
This is the link to his work in the MOMA exhibition: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/inventingabstraction/?work=14

Here is the link to my attempt to mimic this work with Processing:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/isg173qzdmrftwl/Assignment_1.zip
I tried to match the colors as well as I could and focused on the squares and the wire. There is some randomness to the squares that have dots on them and I randomized the angle of the wire lines to make them look bent and curved. There are some interactive features. If you mouse click it will toggle between an image of the original piece and my generated one. This allows you to easily compare the two. Also, I added a feature that allows you to scramble the squares into a new order and then you can see them move into their new positions. You press the 's' key to shuffle the squares' position values then you press and hold the 'm' key to move the pieces. It takes about 5 seconds for all the pieces to move into place. You can press the 'r' key to reset to the original placement or toggling to the original image with a mouse click will reset the placement of the generated piece.

ISTA 401 Three Artists

I found an artist on http://www.dataisnature.com. Lucid Phantom Messenge – Herwig Weiser. I did not entirely undertsand what the piece was but it had something to do with inputing electricity into chemicals and seeing how they react. The main point is the idea of observing an autonomous process that you do not have control over. This is what interests me about the piece and about computing possibilities. When I develop games or brainstorm about what I want to do, it often involves some awesome autonomous process that makes the game unpredictable and more interesting experience.

Here is another piece I found on http://createdigitalmotion.com. It is by Peter Kirn. It is a really cool and beautiful visualization of music. This idea of visualizing music is not something super new. It reminds me of the Fantasia movies by Disney. It's very interesting how different but similar they are. I don't understand much about how this is done technically or artistically but i'm interested to try and figure it out.

This is a game from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Game Lab. It is called "A Slower Speed of Light". It is a basic run around and collect 100 orbs to win the game but the more orbs you pick up the slower the speed of light gets. This changes the game a lot and lets you, in a way, experience some special relativity situations and helps people understand them more intuitively. I wish I could play it. Hopefully it will be available sometime in the future. I'm interested in it because of the representation of physics in a virtual environment. I love simulations of the real world. I love playing flight simulators or anything in that venue. Here is the link to the article about the game.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/mit-gamifies-relativity-121101.htm

ISTA 401 Introduction Post

I was homeschooled all the way up till college. I went to a community college my senior year of high school. I took their basic computer class which had a little programming at the end in Visual Basic. I really enjoyed it and that is what got me initially interested in programming. The next semester there I took a very basic C++ class which really only taught simple syntax.

Fast forward to present day and I am a senior CS major hoping to graduate this May. I have taken CS 227(java), CS 245(discrete math), CS 345(data structures and algorithms, w/ java), CS 335(More advanced java), CS 252(Assembly), CS 352(C and Unix), CS 452 (Principles of Operating Systems in C), CS 425(Computer Networking Java/C), CS 460(Databases), CS 473 (Automata/Computing Theory), and I am currently CS 466 which is Computer Security which is in C. I have a good amount of programming experience. I'm fairly confident in my technical ability.

As far as my creative abilities go I am not nearly as experienced. I wouldn't consider myself to be very creative but I am excited to see what I end up creating throughout this class.