Coding Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawings in Processing
January 11, 2016 10:06 AM Subscribe
Coding Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawings in Processing
Sol Lewitt created more than 1200 Wall Drawings during his life, developing the concepts behind the drawings and the instructions for creating them on a wall, but leaving the actual wall part to his draftsmen. The central conceit is that Sol's art was in the conception of the work, and leaving the execution to the draftsmen would (1) not change the original and (2) leave open the possibility of joyous happenstance. Well, I'm Sol's newest draftsman! I spent a lot of time finding the original instructions for dozens of Wall Drawings and now I'm coding them in Processing. I'm posting the visual output on this here tumblr. I asked a question about this last year.
Sol Lewitt created more than 1200 Wall Drawings during his life, developing the concepts behind the drawings and the instructions for creating them on a wall, but leaving the actual wall part to his draftsmen. The central conceit is that Sol's art was in the conception of the work, and leaving the execution to the draftsmen would (1) not change the original and (2) leave open the possibility of joyous happenstance. Well, I'm Sol's newest draftsman! I spent a lot of time finding the original instructions for dozens of Wall Drawings and now I'm coding them in Processing. I'm posting the visual output on this here tumblr. I asked a question about this last year.
Role: Head/only dude
Excellent! It's awesome how concise the code for these is in Processing. (BTW, the GitHub link on your Tumblr page is broken.)
posted by ignignokt at 4:19 AM on January 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by ignignokt at 4:19 AM on January 12, 2016 [1 favorite]
These are great! I'm just about to start writing some processing code to generate some wall art for my apartment, I'm looking forward to seeing the code.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:45 PM on January 12, 2016
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:45 PM on January 12, 2016
This is really nice.
Theta States: You might also have a look at Solving Sol, which takes a more "crowd" (and Javascript) approach to this idea. It'd be interesting to compare matching instruction sets once Ben's got more of a backlog done, since some of them can be pretty open to interpretation, never mind the effect of stylistic choices in the lines themselves.
posted by Su at 4:09 AM on January 14, 2016 [1 favorite]
Theta States: You might also have a look at Solving Sol, which takes a more "crowd" (and Javascript) approach to this idea. It'd be interesting to compare matching instruction sets once Ben's got more of a backlog done, since some of them can be pretty open to interpretation, never mind the effect of stylistic choices in the lines themselves.
posted by Su at 4:09 AM on January 14, 2016 [1 favorite]
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I hope you find more of the instructions. If you get stuck, I have 3 Sol Lewitt books on my shelf I could mine.
posted by Theta States at 10:49 AM on January 11, 2016