kadoin-reading03

1a. Crochet was first used to replace flimsy paper classroom models of hyperbolic planes in 1997. By following a fairly straightforward pattern, anyone could crochet themselves an awesomely weird, wiggly, yet orderly (in a non-euclidean sense) shape. What two sisters from Austrailia found, was they could imitate the look of coral by varying certain elements of the hyperbolic algorithm and create an infinite amount of organic looking yarny shapes. These  crocheted coral reef sculptures still lean towards order, but the wide variation of shapes from small tweaks to the pattern give the end result a slightly more disorderly outcome. Crochet Coral Reef website

1b. Making meaningful art is hard, especially in art school where you’re expected to juggle 4 or 5 projects at once and all of them are expected to be equally profound and meaningful. Meaningful work touches people in a lot more ways than just a pretty picture. It’s not so hard to paint a nice and meaningless bowl of fruit just as it’s not so hard to write a generative program that produces infinite images of fruit arranged differently in a bowl. The problem of meaning isn’t just a problem for generative art, but art in general. There are ways to make any type of art meaningful, it just takes a lot of thought, creativity, and ingenuity from the artist.