Syntactic Sugar is over 45 ft of paper and mixed media installation and over half of the material is made from recycled means or repurposing. Such item include transparency paper, underlayment for carpet and spools of discarded plastic. Sculptures are then nestled inside the installation and represent a thought process. The ideas that surfaced from creating this work was how to develop a creative outlet to represent the more technical side of programming.
The motivation was to make a interactive connection between learning how to code and how to quickly pick up and remember processes through visual experimentation. Each of the sculptures represent a snippet of code and it's functionality. While creating the sculptures I thought of the logic that it represents and how to make a connection between a knowledge base that I have had for years while charting new territory.
If somehow it could be possible to effectively integrate a creative technique to encourage learning technical processes, it could be a tap for those who might have previously thought there was no desire to learn technology, or even capable of doing so.
Another important aspect of this philosophy is that the amount of work that went into this piece is based off a mindset rather than skill. I believe what makes this worthy of a glance is the reflection of that effort and realizing that if this is behavior driven work, then everyone has access to those tools.
The title Syntactic Sugar is an idea that represents designing ways to make code easier to read and express. The language of art is used to express ideas to an audience at an incredible rate and speed, which makes for a natural alliance, that hasn't been fully utilized yet.
This is one of the first sculptures I created and represents a try catch block of code that will check for errors in other code. The springs on the eraser represent the try, as it latches on to information, it is spring loaded to capture any "exceptions" and if they are captured then they are erased.
This is an array of different hex codes that represent color. All of these colors are being stored in a variable called colorArray. You could also think of an array as a collection of crayons and the box they reside in as the variable name. This array sculpting is made out of pipe strapping and zip ties, the strapping is the variable name and the tip ties are the indexed collection of data elements (usually) of the same type.
These are ear bud foam covers. Foam is a favored material of mine, so any time I can use it, I will. These represent event listeners, specifically a click event listener. When you navigate a page in your browser, for example and you click on a button there is a piece of code that identifies with the button address and will activate once that button is clicked. The ear buds make the auditory connection between hearing you click a button on your mouse with the code that represents the ear.
These represent meta tables. They provide data that provides information about other data. The material used to represent this mimics a double helix and because metatables are the building blocks of our data this suggests dna for data.
Bugs that exist in the code are represented as ants. All code has some form of a bug at some point along the development process. Their placement is commentary on how human we are. Although we strive for perfection in our day-to-day lives, it isn't built within us.
These house keys represent API keys. An application programming interface (API) key is a code used to identify and authenticate an app or user. This is comparable to using a housekey to authenticate and gain access to your home.
This black sculptures represents functions that are "self contained" modules of code that accomplish a specific task. The image of the code is calling to an api and is within the correct function formatting.
A class is another building block of building a new object. A class is essentially the blueprint you will use to create an object. The object being a new user profile, a new insurance policy or a new car etc. A class is filled with instructions on what kind information it can accept to create a new instance of an object. The largest sculpture is filled with blueprints that represent classes.
All four hanging scultptures/chandeliers represent commands in the terminal/command line/console. The terminal is meant to perform tasks and automate processes without a gui or graphical user interface. Since most people want to navigate a visual interface, starting back at the roots can be intimidating, but after some time moving through the terminal things/errors become familiar and become more natural to troubleshoot.
June 25th 2022 6:00pm-9:00pm 4625 Reliable St # 3713, Ames, IA, 50014
Friday 8AM–3PM
Saturday 8AM–3PM
Sunday 8AM–3PM
Monday Closed
Tuesday 8AM–3PM
Wednesday 8AM–3PM
Thursday 8AM–3PM
Show through June 25th - August 25th 2022
