Author: Elizabeth Doan

I found myself enjoying Reas’s lecture quite a lot more than I thought, and a big part of that was the endless visual examples of works of art that he showed rather than told. It was interesting to see such diverse forms of art, and some pieces even made me question what art actually is. Some of the pieces honestly just looked like close up clumps of hair (3:08) or balls of lint (10:19). Maybe it was a bit too random for my personal liking. Overall, it was still really cool to see just how much randomness there was, which made me think of how different randomness would be when it comes to humans vs computers. Needing random numbers in our code would be easy work for a computer–(and it would actually be random), meanwhile if I was told to choose a bunch of random numbers, I would choose them based on numbers I like and numbers that are special to me. Since I would be more focused on the significance of the number rather than its randomness, it would end up not being very random.

Going back to computer randomness, I feel like I learned a lot more about the structured potential computers have at creating arts of randomness. Take for instance the black and white squares that changed color depending on heads or tails. It looked pretty alright being that random, but just by adding symmetry, it completely transformed the look of the art, and I enjoyed that a lot more than how it was before. It made me realize that just because it’s random doesn’t mean it has to be messy.

The overall concept of randomness and chance when it comes to creating art is still a new concept to me, but I find it to be interesting, and I’m intrigued to see just how much you can do with randomness and loops combined. I would like to incorporate random color and random movement into my work because 1) I think it would be really cool to see what unexpected and/or expected results come from it and 2) all of my projects would look related if I didn’t let randomness take over. I think the right balance between total randomness and complete control is over how serious things are. In the context of Intro to IM projects, I think the freedom to allow randomness to dominate is fine for the creative visuals, while control is more necessary for coding and the order of the code. In terms of using randomness to create everything, I question just how much it would be considered art if everything stemmed from a computer’s algorithm and you having no control over it. It reminds me of the debate over whether AI art is considered art.

Concept:

As someone who is terrible at art and with zero experience with coding, this assignment scared me quite a lot. I wanted to keep it plain and simple while trying to keep it relatively accurate to what I look like. By using basic lines and shapes, I managed to unintentionally make a version of me that seems to have come straight out from Bob’s Burgers, which I found really funny. I’m not quite sure if I succeeded in the accuracy department, but I think it is good enough for my first time!

The Self-Portrait:

 

Highlight:

It took me a while to get used to the trial and error to create a self-portrait from basic 2D shapes, but it got better the more I practiced. However, creating the hair was an absolute nightmare with trying to rotate the arcs. The biggest highlight would have to be when I finally managed to get the hair looking somewhat decent, especially after adding some side bangs

//hair
fill(0)
arc(200,390,300,700,PI,0)

  //hair 2
fill(0)
arc(160,120,150,170)
arc(100,105,180,132,(11/6)*PI,PI/2,OPEN)

Otherwise, it would’ve looked like this egg…

Reflection:

Overall, I’m quite proud of myself for facing my coding fears and being able to create something like this in a short period of time. My brain refused to take in the information at first, but it got used to it eventually. I stuck with the simple plan I had due to time, but I would’ve loved to have been able to add my own personal touch to it and make it interactive. I was thinking of a little flashing camera or a phone on a gimbal. It would also have been cool to make the pupils both follow the cursor so that the eyeballs can move around while never looking at the same direction. Regardless, I’m still satisfied with how it turned out and I think it’s a cute first memory of my coding experience and result! It definitely wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be