Author: Afra

Concept: It took me a while to decide on what to create. I had so many ideas but couldn’t implement them without very complicated code that I didn’t understand. I decided to make the following art piece, using the for loop, inspired by the Olympics logo since I’ve been watching it recently.

Code: I was proud of figuring out how to randomize the colors by making it choose randomly any value between 0-255 for red, green, and blue.

stroke(random(255), random(255), random(255));

Reflection and ideas for improvements: I wish I could make the stroke choose out of a set of specific colors instead of choosing randomly because some colors aren’t that appealing. Having a certain color scheme might help make it look more pretty.

Casey Reas’s talk on chance operations made me reflect on an issue I deeply care about, AI art. As an aspiring artist, seeing how far AI has come truly worries me about the future of this field. One can argue that AI can never take over art because the human touch and emotion cannot be replicated. However, when randomness is introduced to art pieces, what is the line that divides what is human and what is AI? If an artwork primarily uses randomness, does that make it AI? What about replication? Would having more chance elements in a piece make it easier or harder for AI to replicate?

I believe that randomness has value, yet I can’t help but wonder whether the artists who have designed these chance art pieces have thought of the implications of their work. Sure, at the end of the day, the person is creating the code and setting the limits for randomness, but what happens afterward, the actual conception of the work, is out of their hand. Using that logic, one could argue that the artwork isn’t original. In my own work, I’m not against using randomness, but I will limit it to simple things like choosing color or text from a certain array. That makes an art piece more human; therefore, I believe the optimum balance is having more control than randomness.

Welcome to my first IM project!

Concept: I was surprised that I can include emojis in coding so I wanted to play around with it. I went with a simple but cute design since this is my first time coding. I used the emojis to make eyes as well as a waving hand that is tracked by the mouse. I also used my two favorite colors, blue and purple, to make a little smile.

Code: I was a bit worried on how to implement the hijab in the sketch because I did not want to use two circles. I ended up using the stroke of the ellipse to make the hijab and it turned out great!

//face and hijab
fill('rgb(218,173,130)')
stroke('rgb(112,11,11)')
strokeWeight(30)
ellipse(200,200,250,300)

 

Reflection and improvements: Overall I had fun exploring the different variables and testing things out! I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when I chose to enroll in this class but I’m glad I did. Interactive media seems like the perfect blend between computer science and art, two things I’ve always wanted to try out. Coming back to the sketch, in the future, I would try making a curved line for the smile because I couldn’t figure out how to do that.