Category: LookingOutwards-06

http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/artwork/1265

I have always been a fan of simplicity in art and design. All the while providing enough substance to hold the attention of the viewer. I think this piece by Herbert W. Franke does this quite well. After all, it is only a plain white canvas with many squares randomly placed. However, in this simply idea he gives the audience a fun moment to look at his work. He does this by changing the sizes of the squares and letting them overlap, giving the piece an added dimension. Now each different viewer can see something personal in the random amalgamation of squares.

As far as the actually production of the piece, I would imagine, with whichever program he used, he used arrays to hold various sizes and a “random” command to place and call different sizes from the array. He describes the process as drawing and then generating it digitally.

The other day my friend was telling me about Conway’s Game of Life, it is a celluar autmaton and was created by mathematician John Horton. This i a pseudo random program that uses a set of rules to create a different situation based on the starting position determined by the user. As soon as the starting condition is determined, the rules play out. The program will run as long as none of the shapes die. They die if they are completely surrounded and cannot grow based on the rules. I appreciate this a lot because it was not originally created to be art, but since it’s creation many people have analyzed the rules and created some very graphically interesting animations.

Here is an example called Gosper’s glider gun.

I tried to look up randomness in computation of art through architecture and stumbled upon an interesting article: https://www.fastcodesign.com/3052333/the-value-of-randomness-in-art-and-design

There is a project called “Coding Architecture”, which was done by Linyi Dai. It is under the category “Randomness Projects” http://lostritto.com/risd2015spring-seminar/?cat=6. This project was a result of a challenge that students were given, which was to consider what they can do in order to generate random results. Dai used the value that she was given to generate the rungs of a sphere that seem random but were actually well thought on based on what she might have wanted it the different rungs to look like, which was a sphere. What I admire about this project is that these students, including Lindi, use computation as a medium for art rather than a tool and can use the concept of randomness to create something in art that may not be as random as one may think.

In this particular assignment the way that Linyi used the concept of algorithms and randomness was to just use what she was given, values, and create pretty much anything she wanted, which was a sphere that was cut up. when randomness is used in art and architecture I think a person puts together what they want to put together and thinks seems coherent to themselves, but may look completely random to someone else, which is what I usually feel when I’m in a museum looking at artwork.

Nothing is random, whether it has to do with the design of something or the idea of something, there is always a underlying reason for why something is the way it is even if it may seem random. The article states that “randomness” is not a new concept. In nature random occurrences are easily found, but that’s different in a digital computer where the “randomness” is now quantifiable and known. Although the “applications of randomness in statistics, computer science, finance, and mathematics are well established, it is less so in art and design”. This is why I wanted to look more into the idea of randomness in something like architecture, which I didn’t specifically find but I found that there are cases where they use computational practices like randomness to create architecture. Example: Coding Architecture.