Why I held a Art & Tech exhibition 🎨

Soeun/Sona Lee
3 min readApr 17, 2018

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*From now on, I will use this blog to practice writing in english.

Our lives are surrounded by art. In fact, art encompasses many fields. Art is music, literature, architecture, and much more. We listen to music while exercising, read literature and go to art museums with friends. If we look inside of these activities, we are using technology. From these activities, we can heal ourselves and get inspired.

Art & Technology?

The act combining art and technology started a long time ago. I discovered that by the 1960s, the Second Machine Age, technology provided not only the inspiration for art but also its tools. Desmond Paul Henry experimented with machine-generated visual effects by using a modified analogue bombsight computer that was employed in a World War Two bomber aircraft that was used to determine the exact moment bombs were to be released to hit their targets. In 1980s, as home computer usage increased, interactive computer graphics were developed as a result of this. In the 1990s, the rise of the world wide web inspired the creation of art through HTML and browsers. Now we can generate art using smartphones, iPads and notebooks.

Try

Whenever I experience art, I want to do projects that combine art and technology. As I know how to code, I decided that I would make a fun project and conducted some experiments. The first try was to make a sound visualizer on the web. I love music and got inspired by that. Using web audio api, canvas, I made the following project.

After that, I met other people that were interested in art and technology like myself. Together with them, I studied “The Nature of Code”, a book that contains information on how we can write code from the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software. Its focus moves from elementary concepts in mathematics and physics to more advanced algorithms. The writer of this book, Daniel Shiffman, manages a Youtube channel called “The Coding Train”, whose videos are such fun and very helpful. By using only the early chapters of the book, which cover topics such as random, vector, force and particle, I can create various simple projects.

Daniel Shiffman

The following project was made using p5.js while studying The Nature of Code.

using random, particle 🎨

In the case of this project, I used a projector. The project was displayed on a wall and I enjoyed it while drinking a beer 🍺

Exhibition

As part of an on-going project with friends, we wanted to hold an exhibition. In February 2018, we organized a small event at the Seoul Art Space.

Using p5.js, three.js, Max, leap motion, touch pads and other technologies, we made art. Through our art, I hope that people who visit this exhibition will enjoy our artistic endeavours.

And..

I want to make art that people can enjoy. Although I never formally learned about art, everything around me inspires me to create art. By combining art and technology, we can create awesome things. This is only the first step.

Reference

Kadenze: https://www.kadenze.com/
The coding train: https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman
History of Computer Art: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/GCA-VI.3e.html

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