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Solving Sol

solvingsol.com

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Hey wow! Site author here, tons more solutions on Github than I've posted on the site: https://github.com/wholepixel/solving-sol

Sol LeWitt, and his cohort of generative conceptual artists, are really interesting to evaluate from a software engineering perspective, and I hope you'll take a look at what they're all about!

Are all of these solutions available anywhere?

They all seem to simply be html files, so github pages should be able to serve them, but I couldn't see anything.

I need to update the site - at the time I didn't build any automation from the repo to publishing on solvingsol.com

Are you thinking of doing that? I'd love to check back in once all the new drawings are available.

I love this! Where could I find a list of all the artworks? So that I could solve some new ones?

In the Github repo there are a number of unsolved entries, and you can also make a new solution for a "solved" one – since there's no correct answer for any entry.

To see all of LeWitt's work, MassMOCA has an excellent online collection here: https://massmoca.org/sol-lewitt/

MassMOCA (in western Massachusetts) also has a wing devoted to LeWitt's work with wall-sized installations of dozens of them–highly recommend a visit!

Are you aware how poorly it loads on mobile? At least in my safari it’s impossible to make the text fit in any readable manner, I can plain text it but and I did, but it was u readable without doing that.

You're right, it renders terribly on mobile. I'll see if I can find time to fix that today.

This reminds me of the description texts in heraldry.

For example, the coat of arms of Finland: "Gules, semy of roses argent, a lion rampant crowned Or trampling a sabre in base proper, his dexter foreleg in the form of a man's arm vambraced and embowed argent garnished Or bearing aloft a sword proper."

And somehow from this emerges a special lion with a sword through it's head: https://satwcomic.com/coat-of-arms

> Gules, semy of roses argent, a lion rampant crowned Or trampling a sabre in base proper, his dexter foreleg in the form of a man's arm vambraced and embowed argent garnished Or bearing aloft a sword proper.

Translation:

Gules: Red

Semy: Background

Roses argent: Silver roses

A lion: A lion

Rampant: Standing

Crowned Or: With a literal golden crown on its head ("Or" meaning "gold")

trampling a saber: stepping on a saber

in base proper: the saber should be colored normally

his dexter foreleg: The right "arm"

in the form of a man's arm: the right "arm" should be a man's

vambraced: wearing armor about the forearm

and embowed: bent

argent: silver

garnished Or: decorated with gold ("Or" meaning "gold")

bearing aloft: carrying

a sword proper: a sword colored normally

So, in normal speech, this is a basically a technical specification for:

1. The background should be red with silver roses

2. The foreground should be a standing lion

3. The lion should be wearing a golden crown

4. The lion should be standing on a sword, colored normally

5. The lion's right forearm should be a human's, armored

6. The armor of the forearm should be silver with gold decoration

7. The human-like right forearm should be bent and raised, carrying a sword

8. The sword should be normally colored

Anyone who knew heraldry when it was important would be able to take that description and churn out a reasonable facsimile of the crest.

The lion isn't stabbing itself in the head any more than a "suicide king" is.

I remember when I was vectorizing flags (the simple geometric kind, though, since I've done it with a text editor and some scripting/templating) on Wikimedia Commons as a pastime years ago. I got reasonably well-versed in parsing heraldry as a side-effect and it was fun in a way, considering that it is indeed a fairly precise description syntax for coat of arms and flags.

And I got confused when GRRM started using proper heraldic descriptions for flags in ASoIaF with the third book, while the two before were basically just very simple English descriptions. Most readers probably never really noticed :)

Have you seen https://drawshield.net/create/index.html ? It can be a bit hit and miss but it will attempt to display your shield based on the blazon text.

Can you draw seven red lines, all of them strictly perpendicular, some with green ink, and some with transparent?

And for bonus points, can one of them be in the shape of a kitten?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg for the confused :)

I really love this. The original art piece is just a set of instructions meant to be fed into our minds and generate an imaginary canvas. Now we use technology to just feed the same set of instructions into software to generate virtual canvases

This is great, thanks for sharing! I wish I had known about Sol when I used to teach high school geometry; the fact that many of these constructions can be interpreted pretty openly would have produced a lot of different "answers" and opened up the floor for conversation about rigor.

Instead, I had my students construct the flag of Nepal (see http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/np01000_.html for the specification). Let's just say that most of the students were not as captivated by the idea as I was.

Love it!

I implemented something similar in Mathematica: http://blog.benwiener.com/programming/art/2017/08/24/lewitt....

My friend implemented it in Elm: http://www.philipzucker.com/elm-eikonal-sol-lewitt/

Such a cool project!

I’m going to be doing a similar exercise in an upcoming Generative Art workshop that I’m giving.[1]

I love how LeWitt’s work seems so simple on paper, but can look so impressive on a larger scale and in a natural environment.

[1] https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1052687485715836928?s=21

Sorry, I don't have anything substantial to add. Just that I love Sol's art and got all giddy seeing this!

I was expecting to see a Solitaire solver.

I think the point with #797 is that the artists for each line are different, and thus there is compounding error. As it is, each line is identical to the last except for color.

My first thought as well. It raises some interesting questions. Does the perfection of execution take away from the art? What if the meatbag artists were so highly skilled that they executed the same level of perfection? Does it mean different things?

it turns out someone else has explored this exact question:

http://blog.benwiener.com/programming/art/2017/08/24/lewitt....

As for what minimalist art "means", I think that's taking the wrong approach. It's more about how you feel when looking at it, what does it remind you of, what non verbal parts of your mind are activated?

Hey, that's me! Thanks for pointing it out!

I don't see the algorithmically generated solutions as pretty, but the hand-drawn ones seem to have almost fractal detail and are really nice to look at.

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