Art From Code: Early Experiments

Alien Like Form

When we were first given the prompt for this project, I knew I wanted to create some alien/insect like figure. I wasn’t too sure how I was going to create it, but I ended up just getting started anyways. My character ended up looking more cartoonish than I had intended it to be, but honestly it turned out better than I expected. As I was working on it, I remember wondering how I was going to incorporate circular motion into this piece. As I played with circular motion and colors, I ended up just using colors that changed from dark to vibrant and circular motion as a background type thing. The most difficult thing about this piece was probably individually coding each triangular diagonal shape in, because of how difficult it was to pin point each spot.

Computer art is definitely not as easy as pushing a button. This is a false assumption made by those who obviously haven’t tried it themselves. For example, for our first assignment ever, I remember contemplating on why I was taking the class. Because I just remember thinking how much work I had to put in just for the first assignment, which was to just copy another art piece. It definitely gets easier as you get used to the fundamentals, but computer art is still one of the most difficult ways of creating art at least for me personally. Creating art through code was definitely a new and extremely different experience for me. Through this experience, I was able to really experiment with colors, shape, and motion. Honestly, art from code is really just about experimenting and once you start to get a hang of things, from then on you can really start to create complex objects and motions.

Honestly, this was the project that I had the most difficult time with. When it comes to collages, I’ve never actually created one, so I was having trouble just thinking up of one. In class, we were shown a variety of collages and I knew I wanted to import some sort of older photo, because of how good it looked in the collages she used. So the background is an Old Sacramento photo (which is where I’m from), with the famous painting of the scream cropped out. So I decided to use two screams and kind of make them distorted in their own ways because I thought it would be interesting to kind of see famous arts in an unorthodox setting.

clock

I was extremely fascinated with this project because it was interesting to see how one could connect time with objects in motion, while also formulating it into an art piece. As I started to work on this project, I had trouble just figuring out the logistics and fundamentals of time in processing. It was interesting, though, to see how you could change any variable you wanted and replace it with time. While I was brainstorming about what I wanted to create, I knew I wanted to create two inanimate objects that would end up overlapping in some way. So for minutes, seconds, and hours, I added variables that would change the rectangles lengths. This project was interesting overall because at times it actually looked better than other times, and this was because of the variables that changed when time changed.

Author: Ben Park