Monday we had another Maths & Art lecture, and I felt slightly duped. I came in expecting an art lecture and discovered maths. We covered symmetry. Again.

It might be partly the class's fault, as an observation on the state of affairs in regards to maths was pointed out to me by a classmate. No one answers questions, so perhaps our lecturer interprets that as no one really understanding what is going on. Which is not the case, they understand, they are bored with the slow-paced progress. While sitting in class I observed something else I've started to recognise. If a lecturer is not engaging enough, they may end some statement with a question. Listeners only recognise it as a question after it becomes apparent that the talker is waiting for a response. Except they don't know what the question was.

It was only an hour as we had tutorials later in the day. Tutorials are occasional smaller classes (we're divided into 4 groups) where we get to discuss issues relating to to the subject. This was our opportunity to discuss our essay and practical with each other, critique or suggest ideas and run our own ideas by our peers and our tutor.

I had a couple of ideas, one based off an article that I read about whether video games can be art. It seems like a strange question to ask, and it was sent by a friend who plays games (and drives me batty in the process), but it was rather interesting. I decided that I could create a small game, it would involve maths and create art. It would attempt to model nature in the process. This is because my abstract asked stated that both maths and art attempt to model or represent nature and that maths and art were essentially part of nature itself (met with some disagreement by my tutor as art is a social construction). Another idea I briefly had was to move back into music, as I've seen some absolutely brilliant maths equations turned into tunes (and visuals) more here. It turns out that there is already a whole genre of art games. But as I've said before we're already doing an audio-based studio project, although it's more about sound than music.

But sitting through other people's ideas I started to think about how little time we have and I feel like I'm over complicating it. Maths and Art combined in a creative practice is second-nature to what my previous "career" was. Illustrator, Photoshop etc are all mathematical programs used to produce works of art (and other graphics of course). I started to formulate the possibility of writing a filter similar to a Photoshop filter. I ran the Artgames thoughts and the filter idea by my tutor who suggested that the two aren't that far apart and I could write a game of sorts that manipulates images in some way. I think I'll go with that.