http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/artificial_intelligence/kurzweil.lhtml
“Programming gives me the power to work on a higher level of abstraction than painting does, " he [Cohen] emphasizes. “It’s as if I work on the level of the platonic ideal, while the paintings the program generates are the earthly instantiation of that idea.
That is definitely something that appeals to me about programming art, the fact that you are working with instantiable abstractions. Many artists produce series of works around the same idea, using code to produce work formalises and allows greater control over doing so.