When does process become art? When do tools become collaborators? Let's explore the world of procedural art -- both analog and digital -- through the wall drawing of Sol LeWitt. This talk teaches how to make art in the style of LeWitt's wall drawings with CSS and JavaScript, and along the way provides some insight into the history of procedural art, the nature of randomness, and how tools and algorithms for creating art lead to new forms of collaboration.
The title of this talk comes from a wall drawing made for the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston:
On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place fifty points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines.
This talk will feature a couple different "computerized" versions of this -- one using random number generation, one using random input from a single user, and finally one that takes input from many users over the network. (If this is going to destroy the conference wifi, this part can be done with a handful of volunteers using a private network.)
If sound is available, some of the demonstrations of randomness can be done with audio of different colors of noise rather than visually.