Beauty may not be the number one concern when it comes to art production, especially in these days; however, the question of the beautiful has preoccupied artists, art historians, theorists, philosophers, and even evolutionists. Recently, I have read several research papers on the subject of computational aesthetics in search of the answers for what is beauty or what we perceive as "beautiful". Computational approaches may not provide us with the ultimate answers but I believe that they could at least throw some logical or more objective explanations to the seemingly esoteric and inscrutable concepts.
Even I come from a rigid fine art background, I have become more and more interested in seeing the projects using computational media or approaches in their making, rather than seeing incomprehensible abstract paintings on the museum walls or statues from the remote past. I certainly am not denying their values or the subtle beauty in them but I would like to acknowledge the positive changes that computational media have brought to the field of art, making art more accessible to digital natives, for example. For the future projects, I wish to create works of art that are approachable and comprehensible to the general public, and as a result of that, I hope their participation will widen the conversation about what is art or what truly matters.
For this assignment, I created a simple drawing, celebrating the end of summer. The message I am delivering here is, "Drink up and kiss the summer goodbye". I started by sketching out rough drawings on the paper and then tried to figure out the position of each lines, and shapes according to the Cartesian coordinate system. For coloring, I used Photoshop to get the exact RGB numbers that I wanted.
Since I have already had some experience with Processing, even if this was my first time using a web editor and p5.js, I did not have much trouble with this particular assignment. Soon I started working with the web editor, I discovered that one great thing about it is that there is no need to download anything or undergo cumbersome installation processes. With the web editor, I was able to jump right into creating something readily visible and suitable for making a myriad of modifications.
Rough sketch on the paper.
Figuring out the right color using Photoshop color picker
Final drawing. The code can be found here: code.