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.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
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:
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.
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