Art and Code: Programming as a Medium

Culture Machine, 2011

I wouldn’t compare a program with the Mona Lisa, but it does have a simplicity and elegance that’s quite handsome. Stylistic distinctions of different programs are intriguing, very much like the differences art critics might see between Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and a Van Gogh...When you write an algorithm using M expressions, it’s so beautiful you almost feel it could be framed and hung on a wall. Gary Kildall (Lammers, 1986/2006: 64)

Humanities

Digital media and culture scholars routinely distinguish code from any common cultural understanding of media in order to underscore its wholly unique function as an epistemological tool. Where media emphasizes a hermeneutical relationship to knowledge as a mode of interpretation based on its graphic or symbolic representation, the idea of code in many ways invokes a far more complex and dynamic sense of how we determine meaning using symbols or signs in language in terms of producing actual programmable events. In the digital universe, computation, in terms of pre-coded rules, patterns and procedures, continues to showcase all objects and events, along with various corresponding behaviours or viabilities. This paper looks first at a range of contemporary philosophers, like Don Ihde, Katherine Hayles, David Berry and Bruno Latour, in order to build a theoretical foundation for understanding some of the changes in epistemology brought by digital technology and computational reason. Philosophies of computation, I argue, inevitably strive to outline a post-human culture and way of thinking about the world. Although the theoretical weaving of coding with human life follows in part from many earlier modern philosophical discussions on the role language plays in our thinking and sense of selfhood, we can see in computation a very specific reconceptualization of reasoning itself, producing, in turn, a host of new intellectual conflicts concerning human agency and our cognitive faculties. The paper then moves to explore two cultural examples of these conflicts, looking first at the practice of "live coding," a unique, performative event where programmers demonstrate coding before a live audience. Whether on a physical stage in front of an actual audience or simply on screen as a live telecast, such performances combine with coding the distinct habits of gesture and voice in an improvised narrative. One single such show by live coder Sean Colombo is presented here in an exemplary reading of this relatively new media genre. A second, equally significant exploration of similar social and cultural conflicts associated with computation's expansion into everyday living can be seen in the work of the digital literary artist, Ian Hatcher. Ian Hatcher's consistently disturbing video enhanced performances evoke both the structure and overall ambience of a live coding event where he enacts the role of the coder/performer in a process of perpetual conflict with the text appearing on screen. While for many, the live coder can be heralded as a kind of exemplary humanist figure in computation, as these performances show, the more material, writerly aspects of coding must inevitably succumb to the cultural logic of the code's literal execution to produce a distinctly post-humanist approach to writing and art.

Self-replicative and generative codes have been developed in Software Art. Intermedia Art´s relations between notation and realisation are expanded by new mutations in relations between readable code and computer processing: Examples of program codes appear as the next step after formalizations of verbal concepts in Dada, Fluxus and Conceptual Art. And on the other hand: These formalized notations can be presented as precursors of Software Art. Lecture, Literatur und Strom: Code Interface Concept, Literaturhaus Stuttgart, 11/11/2005. Published in "IASLonline Lessons in NetArt". URL: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/NAKSe.html With ppt-illustration line [9 MB] (December 2005/English translation: March 2007). URL: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/NAKSe.ppt

The influence of programming languages on creation of modern art, 2016

I have always been fascinated by graphic design and for a few years I have also been interested in generative design. At the beginning, I was sure that it was a very complicated mathematical programming system, but over time, I noticed that it was not that hard. Programming and designing are more complex than I thought. While I was working on digital art, I realized that I do not need to be a programmer. Coding is now being used by a new generation of designers, artists, and architects eager to explore how software can enable innovative ways of generating form and translating ideas. Artificial life (a-life) and graphic design, including data mapping and visualizations, and all forms of new media and expression.

Computer code and programmable objects are a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. Over the past 25 years critical engagement with digital media has become a part of the art education curriculum. However, involving art students in utilizing processing agents as part of studio practice by learning how to code programming languages is a rare occurrence. This article advocates for computational thinking as an urgent need within art education to prepare students to utilize digital innovations and create code-based artworks. By reviewing the constructionist origins of computational thinking for art educational purposes, we posit that creative code can benefit studio art practice while making broader contributions to conceptions of computational thinking across disciplines. We emphasize three concepts to engage in critical digital making by recognizing code as critical text, code as open or proprietary, and code as digital material to be performed and acted upon.

In proceeding of: The 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), At Rhodes, Greece, Volume: 2, pages 76-78, 2009

Media Arts within primary and secondary education is a relatively new avenue of research. Within the context of the arts classroom, rarely is learning to program emphasized despite its importance for creative expression in a digital medium. We present outcomes from an extensive field study at a digital studio where youth accessed programming environments emphasizing graphic, music and video. Learning the language of creative coding is essential to expression in a digital medium — one with increasing importance for youth and society at large. Here, we argue that it's not just in the viewing or playing of digital media but also in the constructive — or coding — experience through which connections to art can be established.

ii iii Preface This monograph represents the written portion of a PhD thesis which focused on the contemporary field of software art. The other portion of the study was a set of five creative new media works. At one level these works provide examples of software art, but at another level they raise questions concerning the nature and boundaries of the genre. Rather than imagining a clearly delineated and integral aesthetic field, my focusat both a practical and theoretical level -is upon exploring dimensions of discomfort, uncertainty and opening.

The study Work of Art as Code Production examines the process of the perceiving the artwork from a socio-semiotical point of view, as text and communication act. The aim of the research is to find out if there is a way to determine whether the text is an art text or just resembling it by using the same structural characteristics. The thesis consists of introduction, 7 chapters and summaries in Estonian and English. The chapters are as following: Artwork as Text, Creation of Meaning. Text Code, Culture Industry as a Monologue, Art as a Dialogue, Semiotic Characteristics of Artwork, Art and Commerce: Elite versus Popular, Logical and Mythological Code, Subcultures as New Pop-culture. Artwork as Text introduces the theory of aesthetic texts and reception mechanisms of Umberto Eco. The semiotic definition of an aesthetic text gives the structured model for an unstructured process of communicative interplay. In fact, the reception process of artwork is code creation. Each time a member of the audience is (re)reading an artwork there is happening a new code creation from the codes of the artist and the codes of the recipient. There is no certain number of interpretations or codes that can be created. The main characteristic for artwork code-creating is deviation from the norm. The best readability makes code that is not too strange nor too obvious. The receiving process of a text of art makes the audience to give up denoted so called natural interpretation and step out of the pattern of a hegemonic way of thinking. Creation of Meaning. Text Code is approaching art texts as a unique symbiosis of structure and substance Je ne sais pas quoi, which cannot be separated. Contemporary semioticians refer to the creation and interpretation of texts as " encoding " and " decoding " respectively. According to Stuart Hall's encoding/ decoding model the message is being created with multiple meanings. There are three main reception modes: full or hegemonic mode, partial mode and rejecting mode. In Hall's active audience theory the audience is taking actively part in the process of decoding. The work of art always requires the audience's active participation in the process of communication. From the point of view of the reception theory there are two types of texts: ordinary mundane text and hypertext.

Digital Creativity, 2020

The term generative art is mostly reserved for practices in which artists construct systems containing various degrees of autonomy. This is designed to generate results that would otherwise be unlikely. In contrast, photography is understood as a situation wherein an agent, the photographer, uses a pre-existing system constructed by other agents with the sole purpose of yielding results that must always be predictable. One strand of photography wherein such conceptions of the medium prove inadequate is generative photography. This unique exploration is characterized by three qualities: (1) Extensive use of self-constructed apparatuses for harnessing technologies explicitly dedicated to the creation of photographs; (2) Uncompromising insistence the seriality principle in producing photographs; and (3) The integration of chance or randomicity as an important creative factor. This paper traces the history of generative photography from its origins in the near-forgotten philosophical movement of information aesthetics. It argues that generative photographs elucidate a concept of artistic constructivism onto which may be grafted the numerical programming of apparative art systems. Thus, generative photography, with its precision of production and concise visual expression, can be understood as the final phase of photography, or, through Max Bense’s concept of ‘programming the beautiful’, as a precursor of generative computer art.

Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 2017

In conceptual art, the idea is not only starting point and motivation for the material work, it is often considered the work itself. In algorithmic art, thinking the process of generating the image as one instance of an entire class of images becomes the decisive kernel of the creative work. This is so because the generative algorithm is the innovative component of the artist's work. We demonstrate this by critically looking at attempts to reconstruct works of early computer art by the re-coding movement. Thinking images is not the same as thinking of images. For thinking images is the act of preparing precise descriptions that control the machinic materialization of images. This kind of activity is a case of algorithmic thinking which, in turn, has become an important general aspect of current society. Art education may play an important role in establishing concrete connections between open artistic and more confined technological ways of thinking when thinking progresses algorithmically.