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Art As Programming
Here’s Knuth’s original “Art As Programming” lecture as a PDF:http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf
Any new activity tries to dignify itself by declaring itself “the same as” an older, more respected activity. Art is still trying to make out it’s a liberal art… As the new activity becomes more respected for its own achievements, this becomes less of a necessity.
I’d make the opposite claim to Knuth. It’s not that programming is an art. it’s that art is a form of programming. By this I mean it is a way of structuring a set of symbols to generate a state or set of states in a given system, in this case human consciousness. The state generated may not be the same in all people but then a program may not generate the same states (or even run) on different machines, even if it’s written in java or ANSI C.
Cave paintings are programs for hunts or rituals, and it goes on from there…
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rheart In Progress
Here’s rheart (formerly Got To Start Somewhere) making some baby steps drawing around shapes. The second image is the bottom-left part of the first image to show how the path around the shape is slightly random.
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Drop The Constraint
An aesthetic can be regarded as a set of constraints. “Realistic” representation has the constraint that everything share a common viewpoint and space. Other constraints may be more important. If showing forms from their canonical viewpoint is more important, you have to drop the constraint on showing things from the same viewpoint. If you do so, you get Egyptian art or some of Picasso’s work. -
Drafting The Gift Domain
Greg London’s “Drafting The Gift Domain” is an excellent introduction to the legal basis of Free Culture. Greg takes a nonpartisan look at the history, development and current state of copyright and patent law (in America), the recent development of Copyleft and why some licenses are better than others for ensuring the development of what he calls the “gift domain”. Well worth a read. -
Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig’s new book Free Culture is available under a Creative Commons license. I’ve just started reading it and it looks like a very good description of the history and current primacy of the cultural asset-strippers who drive our “intellectual property” law.
As you know, my art is available under a CC license. Creative Commons are working on a UK-tailored license, and a revised 2.0 license. I’m worried that the 2.0 license will take out too much boilerplate (notably any representation that the licensed work is the licensor’s own) and allow the licensing to be arbitrarily changed (the composite work section of the license). Creative Commons achievements so far have been incredible, I hope they don’t weaken their licenses to please a vocal minority of bandwagon-jumping bloggers and weekend DJs otherwise I’m going to have to stick with CC 1.0. -
Literate Programming
I’ve moved my AARON -style program from Prolog to Python to Lisp to Dylan, and now I’m programming it in a literate programming style using noweb. Literate programming means combining a human-readable description of the program with the code and using a program to extract the code and well-formatted documentation from this shared source. It’s like illuminated manuscripts for code, and a technique I’d like to apply more directly to image programs (such as PostScript or MetaPost code).
Hopefully the extra effort will be worth it:
• Having to describe what I’m doing is helping me to think more clearly about what I’m doing.
• This is a long term project, so the documentation will help me to start hacking on it again after any breaks.
• I can present the program publicly, unlike with AARON. -
Titled
There’s overlap between the eye of colour poetics and the eye of cognitive science. They meet in the compression schemes used by digital image systems such as computers and cable TV to squeeze pictures over networks by throwing away details the eye isn’t supposed to notice then reconstituting them later using a standard replacement scheme. In my day jobs I’ve had to learn to spot “compression artefacts” from too much information being thrown away in such images. I have trouble watching cable sometimes…
The images of “Titled” are standard colour contrast illustrations from colour theory manuals (and “zips”, but that’s another story) degraded by computer compression. The two-dimensional equivalent of Turk’s Judd cubes, only more two-sided. They look aesthetic, which says something computational about aesthetics or something aesthetic about computation. I had to make them, it was necessary.
They’re uncomfortably pretty images. -
Surgical Strike
Liberal arts and the military technology of computation make strange bedfellows. There is a danger that computer art is just the aestheticisation of military ideology, a sugar coating that makes the military-industrial-entertainment complex easier to swallow on the way to the cubicle. This serves business well, but art is not business even if there is a business of art.
These images were made using a computer language that I wrote for the project. The language was derived from military terminology, and the images were meant to be parodies of William Latham’s then-famous swirly evolved computer art. It’s no accident that artistic Darwinism was popular at the same time as social Darwinism. Replacing Latham’s spheres and textures with stealth bombers and IT logos seemed more honest. Introducing the history of software into the background and trapping the image between that and the text of the program that executed to create it in the foreground completed the work.
It’s a concrete allegory.