What’s Hot in the Art World? Algorithms | Hacker News Reader

What’s Hot in the Art World? Algorithms

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64 pointsalexis27 comments

Lambda diagrams (http://tromp.github.io/cl/diagrams.html) offer an artistic depiction of algorithms. Here is, for instance, a prime number sieve:

    ─────────────────────────────────────────────────
    ┬─┬───────────────────────────────────┬──── ────┬
    │ │ ┬─┬ ────┬─┬────────────────────── ┼───┬ ┬───┼
    │ │ └─┤ ────┼─┼───────────────────┬── ┼───┼ │ ┬ │
    │ │   │ ┬───┼─┼───────────────────┼── ┼─┬─┼ │ ┼ │
    │ │   │ │ ─ ┼─┼─┬─────┬──── ──────┼─┬ │ ├─┘ └─┤ │
    │ │   │ │ ┬ └─┤ │ ┬─┬ ┼─┬─┬ ──┬───┼─┼ ├─┘     ├─┘
    │ │   │ └─┤   └─┤ └─┤ │ ├─┘ ──┼─┬─┼─┼ │       │  
    │ │   │   │     │   │ ├─┘   ┬─┼─┼─┼─┼ │       │  
    │ │   │   │     │   ├─┘     └─┤ │ ├─┘ │       │  
    │ │   │   │     └───┤         │ ├─┘   │       │  
    │ │   │   │         │         ├─┘     │       │  
    │ │   │   │         ├─────────┘       │       │  
    │ │   │   ├─────────┘                 │       │  
    │ │   └───┤                           │       │  
    │ │       ├───────────────────────────┘       │  
    │ ├───────┘                                   │  
    └─┤                                           │  
      └───────────────────────────────────────────┘

Very beautiful, the notation looks similar to Frege's concept script https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/scav/frege/fr...

Is it well-known that these diagrams look like VLSI layouts?

I would pay to have this mounted on my wall.

This is good, interesting news. Many years ago I did some work combining calligraphy and code, but found that art-people didn't appreciate algorithms and code-people didn't appreciate art.

Here's a card I made for a friend who said that rc4 was "the most important algorithm that will fit on one page": http://i.imgur.com/TUeJS7y.png

Pardon the bluntness, but I think you're missing the point. Algorithms have artistic value for what they represent -- and not because of the font, programming language or even social language they're written on. It's like taking the famous formula "E=mc²" and write it in a cryptic font to make it 'artful'. For me, the beauty is in the simple (and amazing!) meaning that mass and energy are equivalent. Making the formula legible and neat highlights that, in my opinion.

No pardon necessary. I wasn't trying to make a point about what the intersection of algorithm and art should look like (and certainly not saying that my doodle is the right way!), just saying that I'm happy that these worlds are becoming aware of each other. I think this will be fruitful.

We can agree to disagree on legibility and what is 'artful' for algorithms much like art fans of the last century wrestled with abstract art. I enjoy the art world precisely because it is so rule-less and undefined, unlike my day-to-day coding.

Sorry to be negative, but as someone who considers myself both an art person and a code person, I don’t find the example very compelling as either art or code or as a union of the two.

Your friends’ lack of enthusiasm for it doesn’t necessarily prove anything about their (in)ability to appreciate other fields.

For contrast, I consider many of the links here to be examples of great art (and great exposition) related to code/formal models: http://conceptviz.github.io/

This is silly, there's plenty of art that takes a subject and renders it in an incongruous medium. It is usually not productive to criticize art for not achieving something it is not trying to achieve. I'm not taking a side on the question of whether the code calligraphy is good or not, but your argument that it's bad because it doesn't follow the particular model that you think is the correct intersection between art and data does not hold water.

I didn’t say it’s “bad” in any objective sense. I said I don’t personally find it very compelling, and it’s in my opinion very thin evidence on which to ground his sweeping statement: “[I] found that art-people didn't appreciate algorithms and code-people didn't appreciate art.”

I don't see a meaningful distinction between what makes a qrpff tie "art" and what makes calligraphic code "not art". He even named the piece aptly: "the most important algorithm that will fit on one page".

Thing is, "E=mc²" is already a symbolic representation of the relationship, on two levels - choice of units and dimensionality, and also use of arbitrary letter shapes to represent quantities.

When you spend all day hacking code with a text editor it's easy to forget that code is really a linear list of symbols, and the text version of the code is just a human-editable representation of it.

So it's funny to think art buyers have persuaded themselves they can "buy" an algorithm, or that a printout of an algorithm is the same as the algorithm itself - and not just one of infinitely many possible representations of it.

Algorithms have artistic value for what they represent -- and not because of the font

That is true for all great art though. The Art is not the pretty picture but what the picture represents and symbolises, the pretty picture is just the medium used to try to present that.

I believe that, to some degree, we can compatimentalize the beauty in the representation and the content.

Take a discernment test which I would call a "substitution test": if you replace the content and the artistic value is more or less unchanged, I claim the representation is the highlight; if replacing the content destroys the values I claim the content is the highlight.

For example, for a picture of Monet, if you swap the scenery for another similar one while maintaining the style not all value is lost. However, if you take E=MC^2 and replace that with B=CD^3, the value vanishes.

I claim that algorithms have a great value in terms "content", and picturing it in illegible text highlights instead a "representation" (since you could replace that code with any other algo) -- missing the point.

Since I'm stuck late coding tonight, a little art talk is fun. :)

Representation and content are not so easily separated. (Marcel Duchamp is all over this.) And to the extent that this division exists, they can combine in a cumulative way; great representation with great content.

My field, calligraphy, is keenly aware of the "content problem". (My humble works[1]) Are the great Chinese calligraphers "missing the point" of the poems in their works when the resulting script is illegible to most?

Especially in the west, it seems people take writing and letters so much for granted that they assume the only appropriate function is for them to be easily interpreted. (Before abstract art, people held similar ideas that the purpose of painting was to easily convey what the artist had seen.) Perhaps in a similar vein, you're saying that the only appropriate use of algorithms in a piece of art is for them to be communicated clearly and faithfully?

We are in agreement that algorithms have great value in terms of content. And I'm excited that the art world is growing aware of the "value" of algorithms. It's been my impression that the art world was stuck too long on the physical forms of computing technology (the cases, the monitors, the phones, the wires, the blinking lights), so it's exciting to see how artists will interpret the beauty of algorithms themselves.

Okay, now back to coding.

EDIT:

Some beautiful Chinese calligraphy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calligraphy#/media/Fil...

[1] http://instagram.com/wanderingstan/

You're taking a pretty shallow side in a battle that has been raging in art for centuries. Particularly in the Twentieth Century, a lot of artists forged styles that were specifically and intentionally devoid of content – see abstract expressionism. Even before that, the 19th Century saw the same argument take place in music, with the Brahms vs. Wagner debate.

In my opinion, you have it pretty much backwards. Ideas matter much less in art than representation. A great idea poorly executed is not good art. Just like a startup.

I have a side project you might find interesting (http://commits.io). It takes any git hub repo and creates a poster out of it. Then it overlays an image of your choice and colors each letter to represent that image, pixelating it it.

So cool!

You can take a look at Leon Ferrari Calligraphy Art [1]

[1] https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=leon+ferrari+calligraphy

How have I not seen his work before?! I love it.

I thought this was going to be art generated by algorithms...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

There's got to be some interesting copyright licensing discussions going on there. Like when Don Knuth declared in 2004 that MacPaint was "the best program ever written", but it took until 2010 to convince Apple to release the source code. https://web.archive.org/web/20100721233205/http://www.busine...

https://www.artsy.net/auction/the-algorithm-auction seems to be the auction in question.

A friend of mine won a poster design competition 10 or so years ago with an entry that was scripted in Flash (ActionScript, or whatever it was). From memory, he had a few other pieces created in the same way, playing around with various functions. Ahead of his time!

> Simply put, an algorithm is a procedure for a process,

"Procedure for a process". That's very vague. Might as well write "method of doing".

Method to compute a result.

More technically, method to produce or alter a piece of data.

(Because we should not neglect algorithms that operate on data structures.)

An infinite loop is an algorithm. No result required.

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