Current student work: Arts441M Programming For Artists Class Wiki.

Project: Exciteable, Sad, Content using code and primitive shapes. Students are using the programming environment Processing to create simple shape compositions.

Nicholas Duchnowski

Willis Bulliner: Content

Clint Miceli: Sad

The following is a small sample of student work from the 2003-2004 Programming For Artists class that Jonas Downey and I developed. Work from my own spring 2006 Programming ForArtists class (a different syllabus) will be added this year as it comes.

Project: Create a Swarm. This is our introduction to generating a multitude of graphic images on the fly (sprites, in director) and programming each with autonomous movement; usually the second programming project for students.

Tanya Crenshaw. 2004. Project: Create a Swarm.
Tanya's project created a swarm of small otherworldly avian creatures whose color changed to a neutral black when they became part of the swarm (or crowd) and then to a completely different color afterwards 'because when you leave a group you are forever changed.' This director project also programmatically played with 3D perspectives, generated completely within the code; the closer to top left-hand corner the entities flew, the smaller they would become.

 

Peter Dobill "Sperm and the Egg." 2004. Project: Create a Swarm.
Peter was an undergraduate in photography and had very little programming experience when he joined the class, but was gifted at coming up with themes or metaphors for each computer programming assignment. Use of black and white in this case was interesting, as was the outcome of each user click.

 

Peter Hong. 2004. Peter hand-coded this game from scratch. Though this project is way less poetic than we would have liked, this computer science student went on to "create an interpretive time piece" as his next project, and then to pair up with one of the art students in the class and learn about landscape architecture for his final project, which was a CAVE application. One of the greatest rewards of having a class with so many different disciplines in it is watching the knowledge exchange between students.

 

Kelly Cree. 2004. The movement of this swarm of tiny, strange ghostlike entities was really effective. They bustled about in a crazed state until one clicked on the screen and then they hypnotically moved toward one of the corners of the screen. Interesting project for a first-time programmer.

 

3D Immersive Animation for CAVE environment.

Chad Tyler and Peter Hong "Supermodel Terrain."2004. I had just gotten keys to the Beckman Cube (a CAVE environment) and was so excited by the prospect of 3D animation that I prodded two very capable students into creating a 3D piece for their final project. They made a great team; one was a computer programmer with little art experience and the other was a landscape architecture with no programming experience. The outcome was fantastic - a terrain generator that accepts pictures of a supermodel's face and creates from it a black and white mesh landscape, a commentary on media and place - public space? I look forward to many more years of teaching 3D animation!

Storytelling. Create a narrative using 10 buttons.

Chad Tyler. 2004. Chad was an undergraduate landscape architecture student who had very little prior programming experience. His projects stood out for their use of space and perspective; it is always so rewarding to watch students incorporate their passions into their programming artwork. This is one of the most beautiful (and slightly incomprehensible) pieces about loneliness, love and existentialism that I've ever seen from one of my students.

 

Kathy Kruszewski. 2004. Kathy was a photography student with absolutely no programming experience. We really liked the graphic style she used for her first computer program.

 

Julia Simon "The Adventures of Fath'r." 2004. Julia was a general liberal arts and sciences major who had no prior computer programming experience and was one of the most enthusiastic and disciplined students we had. We suggest that our students make their own interpretations of subject matter that they chose to use; i.e., no straight intepretations of rock band bios, your own resume, or the Bible. This project wins the class award for the oddest use of religion in any graphic novel narrative.

 

Ana Mendez and Leslie Cuyjet. 2003. Ana and Leslie were undergraduate dance students who had absolutely no prior programming experience. As a first project they created for their 10-button assignment, a proposal for an audience-response blueprint for a dance they were choreographing; depending on which selections the audience would make, they would modify their dance accordingly, on the fly.

 

Jonathan Sarmiento. 2003. Jonathan was a graphic design undergrad student with no programming experience. For his first project he created a game based upon found photographs. All movement in this game is programmed; no "tweening" is used (this was one of the requirements.) Great use of music in a first project, this piece really shows the importance of using good raw materials. Click on the lower-left hand flashing box to get this piece started (and subsequent flashing boxes to continue.)

 

Molly Sheehan "What Season Is It?" 2003. Molly was an undergrad math student with no programming experience, who for her first project created a seasonal calendar that attaches to the user's clock. Impressively, all movements of objects in this program are created on the fly, using math equations she researched on the internet. Based upon the clock calculations her project performs, she displays the weather outside, a project commenting on machine mediation of nature.

 

Ryan "The Punisher" 2003. Jonas and I were extremely impressed with Ryan's graphic style for his 10-button narrative assignment. In retrospect, as I look at this assignment, I realize I should have googled The Punisher, because I thought it was a character that Ryan had made up. If I had known it wasn't, I probably would have suggested (maybe a bit too soft of a word) that he make up his own character.

 

Generative Algorithm: Processing. A couple of weeks of experience learning processing after months spent in Director was not an easy experience for our beginning programmers. They had to learn a completely different coding paradigm. It was a learning experience for all of us.

 

Chad Tyler. 2004. Chad was a landscape architecture undergrad with no prior computer programming experience. This simple processing piece is a perspective generating device - Chad was trying to develop a program which continuously branched out into binary trees.

 

Julia Simon. 2004. Julia's processing piece was a drawing machine. She diligently struggled for hours coding it and did not get to finish it, but her hours of coding practice really helped her for her final project.

 

Aylin Selcugoklu. 2004. Time Piece. This is a personal representation of a clock.

 

Game. The students were told to "Create a Game" and that was the only directive given. This was the final project for the class and students were allowed to work in groups. We made each student write a paper describing what part they created in the project and what they learned in the project. We felt that learning to collaborate was also an important skill that could be explored in class, and that, in The Real World Outside College, programmers will most likely write code and designers will design, and it might be nice to help them learn to speak to, have respect for, and work with each other.

Julia Simon. 2004. Very successful graphical reinterpretation of photos of the school quad and extremely accurate graphic representation of tae kwondo kicks (being a tae kwondo instructor, I know this!) Press the keys around your "d" key to do various kicks and the arrow keys to advance.

 

Nate, Ryan, Srdj "Beer Drop." 2003. I was told that Champaign IL's University of Illinois has the largest Greek system on any campus in the world. When I saw the splash screen for this game I was a bit hesitant, but it's hysterical and had the class screaming with laughter. The graphics are extremely effective and the music works perfectly well with the piece.

 

Ana Mendez and Leslie Cuyjet. 2003. Cute final project from our dance undergrads who, this semester, have learned to cut digital photos out of photoshop as well as some lingo coding techniques.

 

Karyla Trester. 2003. This game has a very interesting navigation system - a giant llama makes one almost feel as though one's joystick or mouse is larger than it normally is. Interesting graphics and game from a first-time programmer.

Website: Biography/Narrative.
We realized that most, if not all of our students did not know how to create a website, so we spent a week hand-coding html. We felt that even though html is not a "computer programming" language, xml was a valuable skill to spend a couple of days learning. In Spring 2004 we spent a day doing a coldfusion and database demo.

Jessica Zhang. 2003. An undergraduate student with no computer programming experience, Jessica made one of the most beautiful pieces in our class, and the reason I remember this particular piece was that she at first came in very frustrated, with a small Biblical piece consisting of generic nature photos which didn't really tell much of a story about her, and when we made her re-do the project, she came back with this gorgeous biographical piece.

 

Kathy Kruszewski. 2004. Very nice-looking reversal of the old adage "you are what you eat" - fruit fortune-telling machine by a photography student who had never programmed a computer before our class.

 

Aylin Selcugoklu "Warning!" 2004. Extremely successful piece examining place and questioning how we look at our everyday environment from a sophmore undergrad computer programmer who was just starting to learn art.

 

Jonathan Sarmiento "Nervous Website" 2003. Nice use of windows in a narrative website.

 

Kelly Cree. 2004 (on her server: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/cree/www/) Interesting (unfinished) prototypical graphical representation of what was going to become a blog in the future from a computer science turning art major.