Month: September 2023

When Science and Art become one, unexpected things happen. This thought came into my mind while watching “Eyeo2012 – Casey Reas”. At first, I was confused, as the speaker was talking in a metaphorical tone. However, what followed was a journey of great exploration, where the realms of science and art intersected to yield breathtaking results. Casey Reas revealed a world where technology and creativity came together, leading to interesting concepts and expressions.

Through the lecture, a couple of concepts inspired me. I hope that I will explore even further during this course. Some of these were the phenomena of emergence, the conceptional vehicles project, emotions in Art, and the use of randomness to create art pieces.

The phenomena of emergence:

In this part of the lecture, he touches upon the idea that in coding behavior and forms become elements that create the fundamentals of the images he creates. I understood that these generative properties took a lot of precise geometry and calculations to take form. It was interesting how ideas in physics, biology, chemistry, or day-to-day interactions could be transformed into coding logic and then into generative art. In this part, I realized that understanding the underlying fundamentals is key to boosting creativity and decision-making.

The conceptional vehicles project:

 This part was focused on the concept of hypothetical vehicles based on the animal nervous system. What I like the most about this part is how it gradually transforms into Art. I have realized that when we only see the final product of a project we do not understand or appreciate the underlying process or story behind it. If I only saw the final piece, I would have never thought it was based on this specific concept or any concept at all. I would have thought it was a form of expression and that is it. I have realized that often the story behind something along with its representation gives beauty and a stronger connection between the viewer and the piece.

Emotions in Art:

Human connections between one another and between the surroundings are vital characteristics in my opinion. In the lecture, Casey Reas showed some forms of Art that were far from human connection. These pieces were interesting but are not something I would want to explore. I believe that when Art has a humanitarian dimension it is far stronger than when it lacks it.

 The use of randomness to create art pieces:

 In this part of the lecture, Reas showed how some artists like Marcel Duchamp. His idea that through Art you “make your reality” made me think of how filmmakers, performances, and illustrations put individuals into a new place where they can explore a new logic alienated from reality.

Then he explored the idea of random numbers. When he showed the demos, I realized the infinite possibilities of creating different forms of art with the same logic. Here I understood the importance of exploring different things and taking risks because in this part, if one does not try so many ways, one would not realize the possibilities or discover what one wants to present.

Finally, during his lecture, I realized that there are limitless opportunities to bring in my thoughts, logic, and creativity to create Art. In a world where science and art intersect, a lot of unexpected possibilities take form.

As a psychologist, I learned about chance, randomness, and probability through the scientific perspective. I learned that there is always room for chance when making conclusions, decisions, etc. Reas’ talk reminded me of this but also helped me to see the similarities and differences in understanding chance in arts and science. The most obvious difference is the people’s attitudes toward chance events. In medicine, for instance, people hope to minimize it and bring negative connotations to it, while artists look at chance as something positive, bringing more variability and opportunities in their works. Understanding such varied opinions on the chance concept, makes me think about humans’ urge for power. Power in medicine lies in the fact that scientists want to control chance and eliminate it. Artists want to have less control over chance in order to create works of art that can be powerful in the sense that they are decentered or are moving away from the preconceived traditional notions, e.g., symmetry, rationality, perspective, etc. This point was brought up by Reas and I find it extremely pleasing. However, I might wonder whether his opinion on moving away from “traditional” is a little bit biased in the sense that he talked about specific points of art history or coding when a radical change was necessary.

One idea from the talk which I agree with was that we are all similar in the fact that we are the key decision-makers in the process of choosing how much randomness we allow in our lives/artworks, etc. My key question to this would be how do we decide what is good or bad? Is it more chance or less chance? Although, the answer to this question depends on the context, how much of a chance we are truly capable of perceiving, welcoming, and approving? Moreover, because chance is something that in the long run emerges into something predictable, I believe that it is hard to make a clear judgment of whether chance is always surprising and always unpredictable, which can oppose people thinking of chance as something new. 

Portrait:

Concept:

For this assignment, I attempted my first-ever p5.js project, creating a self-portrait of my beloved cat, Luna. As a beginner, I relied on tutorials and lecture notes to learn how to craft different shapes and apply colors effectively.  This project marked the beginning of my journey into coding, and I enjoyed the challenge of capturing Luna’s character on the canvas.

Code:

function setup() {
  createCanvas(400,400);
  background('orange');
 
}

function draw(){
  
  //luna's head
  fill('gray');
  noStroke();
  ellipseMode(CENTER);
  ellipse(200, 200, 150, 150);
  fill('');
  
  //luna's body
  fill('gray');
  noStroke();
  arc(205, 320, 150, 150, PI, TWO_PI);
  rect(130, 320, 150, 150);
  
  
  //luna's left ear
  fill('gray');
  triangle(160, 140, 180, 80, 200, 140);
  fill('white'); triangle(170, 135, 180, 85, 190, 135);
  
  
  //luna's right ear
  fill('gray');
  triangle(240, 140, 220, 80, 200, 140);
  fill('white');
  triangle(230, 135, 220, 85, 210, 135);
  
  //luna's eyes + puplis
  fill('white');
  ellipse(170, 180, 35, 35);
  ellipse(230, 180, 35, 35);
  
  fill('black');
  ellipse(170, 180, 20, 20);
  ellipse(230, 180, 20, 20);
  
  //luna's nose
  fill('pink');
  triangle(200, 190, 195, 200, 205, 200);
  
  //luna's mouth
  stroke('black');
  strokeWeight(2);
  noFill();
  arc(200, 220, 80, 40, 0, PI);

  //luna's left whiskers
  line(150, 200, 110, 195);
  line(150, 210, 110, 205);
  line(150, 220, 110, 215);
  
  //luna's right whiskers
  line(250, 200, 290, 195);
  line(250, 210, 290, 205);
  line(250, 220, 290, 215);

}

Reflection:

Concept: Order and Chaos

I get the inspiration from this week’s reading (watching) assignment, which is a talk by Casey. He talks about chaos and order in computer generated arts, and I think it is interesting to explore myself how computers can generate arts of order and chaos. My idea is to use simple lines to generate different shapes. I have experimented mostly with random() function, and discovered that even the randomly generated lines can actually follow certain patterns to form different shapes! In the meanwhile, the user can manipulate these lines to form different patterns and shapes so that they can personally feel the change from complete chaos to some order. Hope you enjoy!

Highlight of the code

The code is relatively short and simple. I mainly started with generating completely random lines with random sizes:

for (let i = 0; i < 50; i ++){
  let xPos1;
  let xPos2;
  let yPos1;
  let yPos2;
  let thickness = random(1, 5);
  strokeWeight(thickness);
  xPos1 = random(mouseX, 400);
  yPos1 = random(mouseY, 400);
  xPos2 = random(mouseX, 400);
  yPos2 = random(mouseY, 400);
  
  line(xPos1, yPos1, xPos2, yPos2);
}

Then for the user to manipulate the lines, I created a circle that follows the mouse so that the user can see clearly where the mouse is and better control the lines. Moreover, I modified the last line of the previous code to achieve user’s manipulation of the lines:

line(xPos1 - mouseX, yPos1 - mouseY, xPos2, yPos2);

I tried to use Perlin noise to make the lines move more naturally as we learnt in class. However, I feel the natural movement here undermines the sense of chaos, which is not intended here. Therefore, I decided not to use it and keep how these lines move as now.

Reflections and improvements

The execution is relatively easy, but it took me some time to finally come up with this idea. I tried several other ideas, but they all failed because my coding ability did not allow me to realize them. And this is why I ended up with this relatively simple code, but its effectiveness in exploring chaos and order is still strong.

And for future considerations, I am interested in knowing probably what other elements, such as other shapes, colors, movements, etc, could be added to the work to further explore the idea of chaos and order in computer generated arts. To me it is a very interesting concept even in other fields. Therefore, I’d like to explore more possibilities to discuss and apply this concept!

Sources:

Casey’s talk: https://vimeo.com/45851523

P5.js reference page: https://p5js.org/reference/