MUSIC 256A: Final Reading Response!

Wow, final reading response! It’s been such a long and eventful but also impossibly short quarter. I’m glad we read the Humans in the Loop essay as our last assignment because I think it really sums up a lot of my takeaways about computer art and digital creation. There’s so much beauty in these tools that goes beyond simply recreating what we can do with physical art or music or sculpture. There’s beauty in the process of traditional arts, and recreating those with automated methods doesn’t do justice to both the art form itself and to the potential of the digital medium. I came into this class very skeptical about digital art forms and mostly skeptical about my own ability to enjoy this process and my projects.

My final project has definitely been my favorite project so far. I feel like I’m more able to just play around and actually embrace the process of creation than I was in previous projects. Allison Parrish’s video is a perfect depiction of the enjoyment I’ve found with Chunity. The automated poems that vectorized words produce are interesting poems in themselves, but the beauty behind them comes from Parrish’s process of representing words and their relationships with each other. My final project may be interesting or a cool product, but the beauty and enjoyment comes from my journey playing around with the tools available to me.