Programming as an Art

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Taylor Skidmore

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Apr 26, 2013, 12:22:52 PM4/26/13
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Greetings!

My name (as you can tell) is Taylor Skidmore. I am a senior in High School from the lonely NE corner of Indiana.

I'm posting to ask a favor. For my AP Language and Composition term paper, I am discussing "Programming as an Art." I was sort of unsure where to begin, so I'm taking primarily two approaches: literally art featuring programming (_why came to mind) and "beautiful" source code (such as the Shakespearean programming language). I need to use at least one spoken interview as a source, and I was hoping someone here could so kindly volunteer. It shouldn't be long or hard, and it can take place via Skype or a Google Hangout.

If you having any suggestions regarding "artistic" programming, I would love to hear them! Thank you for your time!

Regards,
Taylor Skidmore

Henrik Feldt

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Apr 26, 2013, 1:03:37 PM4/26/13
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The painting fool.

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Steve Klabnik

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Apr 26, 2013, 1:09:17 PM4/26/13
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I'm of a split mind about it, but "Hackers and Painters" by Paul
Graham seems directly relevant.

Alban Leveau-Vallier

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Apr 26, 2013, 1:11:21 PM4/26/13
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You can have a look at the archeopterix project, at the intersection of programming and music.

On Apr 26, 2013 10:09 AM, "Steve Klabnik" <st...@steveklabnik.com> wrote:
I'm of a split mind about it, but "Hackers and Painters" by Paul
Graham seems directly relevant.

David Paola

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Apr 26, 2013, 1:28:11 PM4/26/13
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It seems to me that once programming becomes creative (once you learn the fundamentals and it isn't such a technical task), programming with others becomes a collaborative art project. In fact, it seems like it might be a collaborative artistic endeavor unlike anything humanity has seen, due to the number of individuals involved.  

Are there any examples in painting, sculpture, music, writing, or any other traditional art form that come close to this magnitude of collaboration?

To make a naive example, compare the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the linux kernel. How many people worked on each? Can you call the linux kernel an art project?

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Dave Paola

Chris Anderson

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Apr 26, 2013, 1:29:56 PM4/26/13
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There's a split in what you mean, that is maybe interesting...

Some programmers treat the act of writing code as an art, and they invest time and attention in the implementation details of what they create. In some cases this application of intention rises from a craft to an art. The thing they are building may be a humdrum payroll system, while the code itself can be art.

On the other hand, some artists use computers and code to make art. In these cases (similarly with code written by scientists) the code itself is frequently not at the level of art. But even though it only crudely accomplishes the goal, the goal is art.


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Chris Anderson  @jchris

Chris Cuming

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Apr 26, 2013, 1:52:59 PM4/26/13
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I think it would be helpful to have a working definition of art. I understand that art could be a rather difficult concept to pin down, but taking a moment to either accept or create parameters for what art is (and/or isn't, depending) will hopefully provide a useful structure to make comparisons and inferences. However, since the focus is programming as art, I wouldn't spend too much time on it - just enough to get a foothold and move forward. It's highly likely that your parameters for art will change as your research and discussions progress.


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Hugh Kennedy

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:00:13 PM4/26/13
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Programming and art is a pretty broad topic. If you're looking for some old programmed art, the ReCode Project has a bunch of interesting examples from Computer Graphics and Art (1976-78), along with a few working Processing ports. There's still a lot of conceptual challenges for software-heavy art to work through though - Marius Watz made some good points here as did Matt Pearson here.

The Fractal Flame/Electric Sheep is a nice example of an algorithm that was intended itself to be "art", rather then just art made with algorithms. If you're more into programming syntax, If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript might be a good start.


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Joshua Noble

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:01:04 PM4/26/13
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Interesting to note that much of portraiture in the pre-photographic era was not "art" in the bracketed sense that we see it now, but a rather functional object to ensure presence post-death, an embodiment of lineage, a token to ensure influence. It may not have been quite as functional as a payroll system, but it certainly had a purpose other than demonstrating taste or tying the room together.

Devin Chalmers

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:10:17 PM4/26/13
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On Apr 26, 2013, at 10:09 AM, Steve Klabnik <st...@steveklabnik.com> wrote:

> I'm of a split mind about it, but "Hackers and Painters" by Paul
> Graham seems directly relevant.

Also worthwhile: Maciej Ceglowski's authoritative response, "Dabblers and Blowhards":
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

The demoscene is a very artistic field; not only do their programs make beautiful things, but the constraints imposed on the code itself mean that constructing it requires a coder to think much harder about their materials and media than programmers usually do (and sculptors, for example, never don't do).
http://awards.scene.org/nominees.php?cat=10

Steve Klabnik

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:33:13 PM4/26/13
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> Also worthwhile: Maciej Ceglowski's authoritative response, "Dabblers and Blowhards":

Exactly why I have a split mind. I hate pg worship as much as the next
person who's on /leaders.

Mikeal Rogers

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:36:48 PM4/26/13
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IMHO, the code *should* not be the art, while many people treat it as such, the code should be the instrument of that art which the code produces.

Code is the brush, the world is the canvas, be a painter :)

-Mikeal

Rune Skjoldborg Madsen

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:38:03 PM4/26/13
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Hi Taylor (and everyone else! I've been lurking for a while, and should probably do a formal introduction soon).

This is something I'm extremely interested in, and would love to help. I teach a graduate class on algorithmic graphic design and art, and it's generally something I think a lot about.

My take on programming as an art form is to think more of programming as just another tool for creative expression. There's a tendency to think that "computational" or "generative" art is something where you let an algorithm spin out of control to get an output that doesn't make any sense at all. I generally dislike the word "generative" because of that.

I encourage my students to look at principles from art and design that was already established way before the computer, and figure out where programming fits in the picture. If we consider design as the basis of all visual arts (with its theories of form, color, balance, proportion, etc), then there's a ton of rules that are best approached in code, because code is rules. Form generation and color theory are just some of them. If you're interested, I did a few talks about this where I explain it in a bit more detail.

I'm actually thinking about writing a book about this, so I would love to see what you end up with, and generally hear from those of you who are interested in the same thing.

- Rune


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Ben Hamill

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:58:21 PM4/26/13
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On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:28 PM, David Paola <dpa...@gmail.com> wrote:
Are there any examples in painting, sculpture, music, writing, or any other traditional art form that come close to this magnitude of collaboration?

I think of things like Movies or TV shows. They have a high number of people involved at a wide range of levels and steps in the process. Also, be ware: Just because something takes a lot of people to do doesn't make it art. Is Hoover Dam art (I realize there is art on and/or near it)?

David Nolen

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Apr 26, 2013, 2:59:50 PM4/26/13
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This is a pretty interesting read from Richard Gabriel (who wrote The Rise of "Worse is Better"), it proposes a Master of Fine Art in Software:



On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Taylor Skidmore <tay...@taylorskidmore.com> wrote:

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Dave Paola

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Apr 26, 2013, 3:33:38 PM4/26/13
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> I think of things like Movies or TV shows. They have a high number of people involved at a wide range of levels and steps in the process. Also, be ware: Just because something takes a lot of people to do doesn't make it art. Is Hoover Dam art (I realize there is art on and/or near it)?

Fantastic example. Can't believe I didn't think of that!

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Dave Paola

Greg Borenstein

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Apr 28, 2013, 1:59:11 PM4/28/13
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Really interesting topic, Taylor. And lots of great resources from people here.

If you're still looking for someone to interview, I'd be up for it.

Before starting to learn programming in my mid-20s, I studied art and art history and played music. Nowadays I do "interactive" or digital art and design.

I think one of the chief difficulties in this conversation is that we use the word "art" simultaneously to mean two different things. On the one hand, it means: "something done excellently". You might say, "she artfully diffused that conflict" or "he's an expert at the art of negotiation".

On the other hand there's the societal function we call "Art". Today, that means painting, sculpture, film, photography, and other things brought together in museums, galleries, international biennials, and other such venues. These objects are part of the "Art World", a network of people engaged in intellectual, physical, social, and economic exchange with each other.

Art in this second sense (as distinct from the first sense) has existed for all of human history. Of course, there hasn't always been an Art Market. Instead there have been different mechanisms for cultures to support groups of people making representations: from tribal paintings as far back as the Lascaux caves and the Venus of Willendorf to church-supported sculptures and frescoes to kings commissioning portraits and history paintings, each historical era has found a different mechanism for supporting Art and in the process given Art a completely different meaning and social context.

Now there's two places where things get really complicated. First, there are historical periods (like the present) where we're kind of halfway between different modes of supporting (and deciding what is) Art. The art market, which started in about 1850 and is still chugging along, has weakened and, in the last 20 years, the international biennial system,and the power of museums have both grown up to become its peers. And, even more recently, digital forms of art distribution and creation have arisen that are even less well-incorporated into the existing systems (despite Cory Arcangel having a show at the Whitney).

When these different models of art distribution (along with their differing definitions of Art and differences in what they value in art) co-exist, everything gets messy and confusing.

And the second thing that makes things confusing is: it's sometimes hard to distinguish between "Art" in this second sense and "art" in the first sense of "excellence". For example, the Art World's opinion of "craft" (another word for "excellence in making") tends to oscillate wildly with fashion. In the 70s, conceptual art raised questions about the economic and material basis of art, often by producing work that flaunted its lack of physical effort, its lack of craft. Other times Art makes extravagant use of craft in order to make a political or institutional point, for example in the use of traditional weaving and fabric crafts in much art taking gender as its topic. Other artists cultivate an idealistic vision of crafts from an earlier era as more pure than the technology of their time and make reference to these in order to appropriate that sense of purity. Still other artists fetishize the craft of contemporary technology in order to engage with what they see as the essence of the present (Italian Futurists).

So, it's obvious that programming can be art in the lowercase, craft/excellence sense of the term. But can programming be Art? Well, there's a rich tradition of using computers in the Art World dating at least back to the 60s. Like Rune said, though, a lot of times that work is less about the code than about the effect produced by the code. These types of digital artists write code and build technology in order to make Art about (and out of) the role that technology plays in our lives. A great recent example of this is Caleb Larsen's A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter:


Basically, it's a box that sells itself on eBay. When you buy it, you agree to connect it to the internet. It then goes on eBay, lists itself, and is sold on to the highest bidder. It's like a tracer bullet for revealing network-aided commercial exchange, the line between the physical and the digital, the idea of ownership, etc.

The art here isn't really the code or hardware that Larsen built, but the object as a whole and how it behaves and how people react to it.

I'm hard pressed to find examples of code itself being treated as Art in the capital-A sense. One place I see that kind of emerging at the moment is in the community around creative coding toolkits like OpenFrameworks.

Some of the work in those communities resembles the "social practice" work emerging in many other parts of the art world: groups of artists working together as a collective in a manner where the individual works are less important than the community itself, imagined as an experiment or alternative society and/or deeply engaged with the wider community around them.

From this point of view, the collective construction of these open source creative coding toolkits, in addition to being products that increase the efficiency of common commercial work, is the actual Art product itself of these collectives.

It's not impossible to imagine someplace like Eyebeam exhibiting pieces of the OpenFrameworks source code along with artifacts produced from it (the long catalog of examples) and documentation of the collective events in which these were produced.

To be clear: I don't think anything like that has actually happened yet, but it feels like we're on the verge of it. And between that possibility for code to enter existing Art venues and the likelihood of new, unimagined venues, for code-as-art emerging online it seems like we're just on the verge of source code as source code really becoming Art.

Coda:

People often find statements like the one in that last paragraph really frustrating. Why should some institution get to decide whether or not something I care about is art?!? I think that frustration comes from the confusion about "Art" (as institution) vs  "art" (as positive descriptor of quality). By saying that something isn't "Art" I'm not saying that it is not excellent or important or meaningful or valuable. And one of the best parts of Art as a collective institution at the current moment is that it's open to change and transformation. A lot of the most prominent Art careers in the last 100 years have been created by forcing some new medium or format into the Art World, from collage to photography to installation, performance, conceptual art, and now social practice and relational aesthetics.

I feel strongly about this distinction because I believe that the long traditions of capital-A Art include a lot of valuable knowledge for understanding and interpreting the world. Want to know about how we see and what that means for gender, economic relations, how we imagine the natural world and built environment? Want to know about power relations between the people who make things and the people who pay for those things? Want to know about the effect of technology as a mediator for how people understand the world and communicate? Artists have been thinking about these topics (and doing so through making and social action) for literally hundreds and thousands of years. Their existing answers won't necessarily apply perfectly for us, but we could learn a lot by studying how they've approached these questions and what tools they have created for operating on them.

In an era when Kickstarter is bigger than the NEA, I worry about a tendency I frequently see in technology-centered people to want to collapse these two definitions of art: to substitute the artfully made for Art. It makes me worry that all of the knowledge about those questions (and many more) contained in the history of Art will be lost, or even intentionally expunged, to be replaced with artfully made, beautiful, and whimsical things which don't ask these kinds of questions.

-- Greg

Greg Borenstein

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Apr 28, 2013, 3:54:00 PM4/28/13
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PS. For more on Social Practice in art, this recent NY Times story is a decent primer: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/arts/design/outside-the-citadel-social-practice-art-is-intended-to-nurture.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Simon St.Laurent

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Apr 28, 2013, 4:13:56 PM4/28/13
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For a slightly different approach, one that I think asks more about the nature (and possibility) of digital art, you might explore Lars Spuybroek's _The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design_.

I think Spuybroek is too optimistic about the possibilities of digital operations, but it's a brilliantly provocative book.  As an explicitly philosophical bonus, I enjoyed his assault on Heidegger's claims about the sublime.

His conclusion:

------------------------------------------------------------
The Web does not yet grasp its own Gothic heritage.

I long for the day when we can see objects forming, like pools of mud, flowers on a wall or clouds in the sky, as pure products in a context of pure productivity, without any intermediaries.  There will be no desires, no opinions, no critics, no designers, just pure flourishing.
------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks,
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/

Taylor Skidmore

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May 3, 2013, 11:47:10 AM5/3/13
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Thank you everyone for replying to my original post. Sorry this is my first response; this is the first time I've been available to actually go through all of your responses.

My teacher has added a stipulation to our original assignment: no sources older than 2006. I will be going through a few of these suggestions, Graham's Hackers and Painters and The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design namely.

Greg, thank you for volunteering for an interview; I will definitely be in touch soon!

Thank you all. If anyone has any more suggestions, I will be more than happy to pursue those.


Charles Hoffman

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May 3, 2013, 12:05:03 PM5/3/13
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On May 3, 2013, at 10:47 AM, Taylor Skidmore wrote:

> My teacher has added a stipulation to our original assignment: no sources older than 2006.

Wow, when I was in school you were lucky to be able to _find_ sources newer than 7 years old to use in a school report :D

Taylor Skidmore

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May 3, 2013, 12:07:09 PM5/3/13
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Haha, I guess it's just the times! We had to do a "practice" bibliography so she could make sure we were on the right research tracks, and mine came back with marks all over it about finding newer sources.


Daniel Fockler

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Jun 24, 2015, 6:36:37 PM6/24/15
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So this is old, as are most of the posts on here, but I'm interested in the topic and I think that it has more to do with the intention of the artist than what they are creating. I think things like music and film are an interesting intersection between business and art to examine programming as art. Is the intention of the artist to expressive themselves through music, or to sell records? Artists make art with the intention of expressing something. Code is mostly about function and it's the programmer's intention to make something functional. Expressing a feeling or idea that isn't about the functional output of the code is very rare. Although the output of code is more often seen as art, if the artist didn't have the intention of expressing something through the output or the code then it's not really art. So maybe the art is defined by the artist. If your manager gives you a task to build something a certain way, is that art by proxy?
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