It has been a minute since I wrote anything new, but thankfully I have found time for another side project and, by extension, another blog post. This one is going to be a little different though. Like everything on this blog it is in fact a data science post. I’m going to talk about art, object-oriented programming in R, and the grid graphics system. It being the time of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras – or “Gay Christmas” as it is affectionately known – I’ll do it with a rainbow palette. Nevertheless, pretty palettes notwithstanding this won’t be a particularly upbeat pride-flag-waving kind of post. There will be art, and there will be code. But there will also be little slivers of darker stories, and in a moment I’ll explain why I’ve made the decision to include them. But let’s start with the art.

Computer-generated artwork has been around for quite a while. The idea of using R for this purpose, however, is a little more recent. Designed originally as a programming language for academic statistical computing, R is now a mainstream language for data science and analytics. Can it also work as an artistic medium? Is there an overlap between our familiar data science workflows and the artistic process? Perhaps we can become better data scientists through art, and vice versa.