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Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

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161–170 of 175 posts

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#161
BFA with emphasis on interior design and studio art. I still paint and love it, but been doing Linux/Open Source stuff for over 20 years now. When I got into Linux it reminded me of when I was a kid on the old Apple ][, that's when I knew I was on to something. I don't regret anything, loved college and what I learned, and will paint for the rest of my life. Still joke about going back for a Master's in Art History one day, whenever I retire I want to travel more and see all the great art museums in the world.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#162
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like your stuff. I've also discovered a new film that I can watch: "Capture The Flag". Seems like a good film. I'm surprised that I knew nothing about it, even though I'm an avid film consumer. I guess marketing really is important. It would be great if you could write a blog post of how you create one of your pieces from scratch. It doesn't have to go into every single detail. At least enough so that those…

thanks! Sorry but I don't have time for something like that.. I guess general illustration and painting rules apply to matte painting as well. Realistic illumination, good perspective and nice composition.. Start from sketch and big strokes with no detail, keep refining and detailing later.. etc. I don't know your level, but for general painting tips I love this old tutorial http://www.androidarts.com/art_tut.htm For…

Thanks for the reference!

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't professional software developers feel the same way about crafting a masterful function, only to find their feature had already been implemented years ago? Somehow, this industry thrives in reinventing the wheel in slightly different ways - once a process is implemented mathematically (in code), it has to be reimplemented again, in slightly different terms (another programming language). We bikeshed in that it's…

No. We don't. There's nothing in the world like standing up on stage in front of thousands of people and having a mistake creep into your work and having people write about it in every newspaper there is. Code review is absolutely nothing compared to what it takes to put yourself out there as a musician or a scientist and have it shot down. Absolutely not even close.

And scientists have the safety rail of peer-review prior to a public mistake. Musicians have the same thing in studio, but not live.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#164
Wow, I never expected so much responses. It seems like there is a lot of us here :)

For me (as student still) it's interesting to see some similarities between software development and design. I consider programming as some form of design - solving problems is design mission from its beginning. It's nice to see people applying experience in solving macro problems (design) to solve micro problems (programming).

Also we all are a bit like Eames - trying to find better and better solution.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#165

Master in fine art here, with a focus on print making with lithography stone... as you can guess, not a lot of work, and hoping to get a show and sell is not exactly something where you get lot of money, even if you're not bad. Since luck and hope ran out after eating too much pasta for a while, I jumped ship when a friend ask me to join him at his small shop — too much work for one guy, and I seem to know a shit or…

If someone made a book/course on algorithms/math from an arts background, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

It's not made by someone from an arts background, but as someone with barely any maths background (stopped learning at 16) I found the book Grokking Algorithms[1] a really good way to learn about data structures etc. It's written with more of a focus on displaying algorithms visually. Doesn't go into massive depth, but helped me considerably in developing intuition in a way other typical recommended resources for alg didn't.

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-algorithms

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#166
post #45

BFA student turned full stack developer here. I wanted to actually share WHY artists can really excel in this space, both positive and negative: 1. We've been trained to critique, and communicate issues constructively. This is absolutely essential to working quickly, the sooner you realize there is an existential problem with what you're doing, the sooner you can work through them. I've become an absolute user story…

I met a master of music once, he did mainly math and algorithms at his current job. He said, he didn't think this would go hand in hand, but after he saw some algorithm stuff from a friend he was surprised how easy it was, so he switched from composing to coding algos.

There's a very strong relationship between music and math as skills, for some reason. It's been commented on and studied in quite a few places.

I have no idea why the relationship is so strong, but it is!

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#167
post #24
post #18

I have a degree in Fashion Design. It was about a decade ago or so. I was finishing high school and contemplating studying graphic design or animation in a renowned school in my hometown (Les Gobelins, Paris). I befriended freshmen who were being sucked up into Flash animation trend and we started working for short-lived startups as Flash animators. Then I discovered the works of Joshua Davis', Erik Natzke's, Robert…

> I currently hold a position in an academic lab, where we blend design, research and engineering to study social sciences-related question within large data sets. That sounds very interesting! Care to elaborate?

Sure! It's Sciences Po médialab, in Paris. https://github.com/medialab (linking Github, as it's much more relevant than the actual site).

The tenets of the lab have (more or less) to do with exploring Gabriel Tarde's theories of "Actor-Network" and monads (nothing to do with FP, mind you). One of the fundamental idea behind this being that everyone now generates traces on the web, and anthropologist/social sciences researchers may use them as a new "terrain" of research.

It was founded by anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, and a group of engineers (who knew each other from school, where they were dabbling with programming for networks/exploration of the web early on). By network, I mean graphs (math).

Projects usually involves triumvirates of designers (usually specializing in information, sometimes students/researchers themselves), engineers, and politics or social sciences academics. Often being two things at a time.

We have regular hackathon-like sessions called "datascapes" where we explore (sometimes, dormant) data sets, either from the web, or digitized (i.e. scanned historical archives, etc...) to make sense of it, and come up with relevant research questions.

(We also do boring stuff to pay the bills, so that we have enough freedom to work on project we like afterwards).

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#168
No degree, but working in arts and in SW development forever. As well as radio host, journalist, architect and mechanical engineering for several years.

I'm movie critic and also appeared in two movies. And made some small ones.

HR asked me the same once. I answered: As architect you are generalist. You have to be scientist, and you have to be artist. There's not so much difference, and from all the differences both have their good and bad parts. Artistic knowledge is not different to engineering knowledge. Just artists are different :)

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#169
post #130

Many of them. a BFA and two MFA's. I started out wanting to pursue computer science, but those classes didn't fit into my schedule (I did my freshman year at UCI and senior year in high school at the same time). The only class that fit my schedule was a Visual Arts class with a "New Media" emphasis. At this time I was also working at the local paper and putting their site online (this is around 1997). I got hooked on…

> currently the General Manager - Digital at Fender Guitars Please tell me you guys have awesome jam sessions to close out the day.

We do.

Here's the office: http://photos.dailynews.com/2016/09/photos-fender-musical-in...

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

#170
post #116
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im am interested in that acting school approach. What makes it different or do you just pick someone from the audience and let them do exercises?

If you don't mind the page being under construction and designed for promotion, the approach is described here: http://spodekacademy.com/about-our-courses .

Thanks a lot - interesting read!
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