Outcomes of Graphical Debugging
|
| The Eye |
Principles of a new type of computer art
During the development of computational models of physical systems or mathematical
structures it inevitably happens sometimes that the program's behavior differs from expectations,
so that the need appears to understand these differences.
The graphical representation of computed quantities is much more expressive than
printing out diagnostic numbers.
If the data to be represented are two-dimensional, it is convenient to convert
numerical values to colors and thus represent the data as a color image.
In various investigations I created thousands of color images this way and the surprises
and the learings were manifold.
Sometimes I found such an image surprising and appealing as a picture, as an aesthetical object.
Probably much too late, I got the idea to store such surprising results of
my program debugging activities in an 'art collection'. In the first acts of collecting I was tempted
to intentionally modify the outcome (as the programmer, I was in control of all
the parameters which let that particular image appear on screen). For instance,
in the eye image above, one could try to center the
small circle with respect to the frame. Soon I came to consider such attempts
as naive and foolish. If anything was fascinating with these pictures, it was the fact that
they were created for no reason else than for understanding the behavior of a (typically flawed) program.
No artistic intent whatsoever. The only
influence of art-related judgements is in the decision to put a created frame
into the 'arts collection' (which implies giving it a title).
Last modification: 2011-10-18
