Rube Goldberg Processor- HFG Karlsruhe

The Rube Goldberg Processor, a collaborative project between teachers and students becomes a highly interesting contradiction of what programming is about.  I was first drawn to this piece because I have always had an interest Rube Goldberg machines and have responded positively to many other similar sorts of endeavors.  This piece was particularly captivating because of the incongruity between programming and a Rube Goldberg machine.  Rube Goldberg machines are designed to complete a task in the most round about way possible, whereas in programming, problems are meant to be resolved with the utmost efficiency.  I was very interested in that relationship, as well as realizing that all the code is still completing its unnecessary task in the most efficient way.

Design by Continum- Mary Huang.

These works stuck out to me because it was an output of computer programming that completely shocked me.  Fashion, very  much like sculpture or painting, has always had the same or similar processes.  The work has always been about the hand, for instance couture fashion is most desirable because it is completely handmade.  The removal of the principal human designer becomes incredibly strange and interesting.  There is a level of customizability, yet the dominant variable in what the dress will look like relies on the program and code written.

http://www.understanding-shakespeare.com/index.html

NOTE: Sorry this is only a URL, the whole website is important to see.

Understanding Shakespeare by Stephan Thiel opens a whole new world for text output.   It is true that the idea of finding the most commonly used words in something, for instance a music (as we’ve seen), is not new.  However, the correlation between a play being an inherently visual output of text, reinvented into two dimensional image is quite thoughtful.  Both are visual outputs, but in an entirely different sense.  Furthermore, trying to understand in a new way, particularly something like Shakespeare- which one could argue has been explored to it’s fullest, is very intriguing.