The red square Dan created in class immediately made me think of two things: Blinky Palermo and the Soviet Union.  One of my favorite paintings by Palermo (also one of my all time favorite paintings) is Composition with 8 Red Rectangles, which I saw at the Hirshhorn last spring and is in some retrospective of his that is upstate right now, so I recreated that with Processing.  Although Composition with 8 Red Rectangles was made with paint on canvas, Palermo was known for creating 2D images like paintings with materials other than paint and canvas, which is cool because that’s sort of what we’re doing with Processing.  Compare the original to my version:

I imported the image from the New York Observer article into Fireworks and just plotted out the coordinates of each rectangle and then used quad() (which made the whole thing way more simple that I thought it would be when I started) to make each rectangle.  By rectangle 5 I was getting pretty bored of that and you can see my rectangles get sloppy by the bottom, but I think it still creates a subtle visual trick, which is part of what I like about the original painting.

Palermo was influenced by the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich.  Malevich actually made a painting called Red Square.  That would have been easier to make.