Open Source Art Project

Stuttgart has a nice modern art museum right in the middle of town.  A few years back, I saw some geometric works by Dreyer  here but it took me a while to attempt a computational version. dreyer.m - Based on Shamsa 2 by Dreyer, four quadrants are assigned, then smaller squares, triangles, and trapezoids are randomly added.  The color palette was borrowed directly from one of his original works.

  This work is a bit different, drawing inspiration from a commercial artist going by the name "the Old Art Studio."  The specific work was " Modern Geometric 34 ."  Credit to Nathan Shaughnessy. triangles.m - This file makes the initial line separating the top half and bottom half then fills in with triangles and trapezoids in a randomized manner similar to the original work.  The specific shapes change each time the code is run, changing the specific positions and angles but still resulting in the same general shape and layout.  Colors are randomly assigned as well.  

This is another Fall 2021 student project, this time inspired by Yaacov Agam .  Two images are created then sliced and combined to make a single image.  The two source images for the image above are included below. Yaacov_Agam.m - Generates two random images, prints them to file, reloads the images for slicing and recombination.  There may be a cleaner way to do this in MATLAB. Credit to Marie Burns.  She initially had it all working with some MATLAB gui code I had never seen before for making copies of graphics object using the function copyobj.  However, she pushed their code too far and exposed some limitations for copying large numbers of objects that we could not figure a fix for.  I helped her with a kludgy fix: export the two images to file, read them back in, then chop them up and export a new image.  To get higher resolution, the initial images are magnified before exporting.   

  I challenged some engineering students to make a contribution to the project and this is one of the first submissions I received.  The works of Joseph Albers  with sets of colorful squares inspired this code.  The  colors are randomly picked each time the code is executed.  Credit to Lauren Juncal and Abby Obar. JosephAlbers.m  - A basic Matlab script to make a colorful collection of randomly colored squares.  Does not work in Octave at this time.  The geometry is fixed but the colors are randomized each run.