A Story is Not a Tree

HOW IT ALL STARTED This project starts with me in late May of last year, surfing on Pinterest and seeing several photos of these DIY “cloud” lamps you could make for your house. I immediately thought, “Okay, these would be…

Aesthetically, the net art narrative that inspired this project the most was Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. It’s an interactive non-linear story that features gifs and hyperlinks. Because I was working in Java and not HTML I couldn’t quite mimic this exactly, but I tried to emulate early personal websites by using Comic Sans and creating pixel illustrations. Essentially, I wanted to create what Hito Steyerl would a poor image.

My conference project began with me following an interest in floaters, the clumpy, dark, things that move across your eyes and are visible when looking at a light, bright surface. Specifically, their movement and shape was what interested me. I…

This project began when I asked Angela about exploring nature through code- she suggested learning how to code snow, and that sounded like a great idea! Angela gave me two pieces of code to work with and combine: one was…

From the pictures I have here, there are two separate projects. The first is a few self portraits, which is what I worked on prior to deciding to pursue inspiration from Vera Molnar, an artist the class looked at earlier…

In a report, Hertlein compared the computer art on display and creators present at the 1975 International Conference of Computers and the Humanitites (ICCH) and what was displayed on the 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity. She uses the comparison to note…

Vera Molnár, as one of the pioneers of computer art, was really interested in repetition and changing her work one parameter one at a time. As a practice, I have several elements I wanted to experiment with repetition and randomness,…

Recently, I have been interested in sound performance that use interactive technologies. However, for this project I thought it would be interesting to practice the opposite idea, which is self-generated computer music. In the 80s, this was the common practice…

Vera Molnár approached her work through gradualism. She would change one parameter at a time and evaluate the aesthetic alterations. This way of creating is a smart way to understand the power of a singular artistic choice. I explored this…

As a future game designer, I plan to do a simple interactive game at my conference. I spend quite a time on what game should I do.  Originally, I am inspired by my city-skyline assignment. In that check-in, I imitated…

Through brainstorming for a space for our Hijack, one of our first ideas was to reinvent the area formerly known as the Atrium Cafe, a Heimbold classic and much-missed coffee and snack source among faculty and students alike. Our next…

Going into this conference project, I really had no idea what I wanted to create. At the beginning of the semester, Angela and I had discussed where my interests laid both inside and outside of the class. In class, I…

This week we were tasked to respond to the thinking of George Nees, a mathematician who became a pioneer in computer arts. He started making drawings with the use of a plotter, employing it as a drawing machine and utilising…

The Grace Hertlein prompt was a fun one to recreate, to say the least. Out of all the prompts we’ve had to complete this semester, I enjoyed this one the most. This is mainly because Hertlein took inspiration from natural…

Vera Molnar is a famous computer artist with her own style. She really knows how to play with the order of computer art. Making the computer art playful, she adds massive functions related to noises and randomness. In her art,…

Some artists might start out their process toward a work of art with rules, with a grammar, but Vera Molnar tries to develop rules as she goes. These rules are derived through repetition, a process she calls “experimental methods of…

For this assignment I began with a for loop that rotates an ellipse. The ellipse is generate by incrementing a variable in the loop as well as through randomness. The sketch draws itself and continues to do so until the…

I was unable to predict the behaviors of each loop, so my process involved repeated subtle reconfiguring and experimentation with different permutations. The resulting images are a series of curated accidents.

For my response to Grace Hertlein I focused on two things. One was to humanize the art and make it feel alive, the other to give the computer more control and follow the surprises it produced. To start, I thought…

Grace C. Hertlein, professor at California State University, is a famous computer artist. She started her work in the mid-1940s and had her first exhibition, at the “Fall Joint Computer Conference”, in 1969. She has her unique understanding toward computer…