code as pure art
I think of art as skill within a medium that is achieved through practiced engagement. Artfulness can be applied to a wide variety of things.
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1950/10/1/the-art-of-knife-throwing
The art of knife throwing. The art of business dealing. The art of speaking, of playing guitar, of painting, whatever. This follows the historical use of the term art. I’m not saying it’s the only right definition, just that it is one, and it’s how I use it.
Coding is something that people can do skillfully, but most of the time when people think of code in an art context, they are thinking of it as a tool to achieve some outcome. It wasn’t that long ago that saying a video game was art was a controversial opinion, but these days I think most people are open to seeing games as a medium of creative expression, but it’s less common to people to consider coding itself as the medium of art.
Programmers spend a decent amount of time discussing what constitutes “good”, “clean”, or “maintainable” code. There have been endless forum flame wars over code aesthetics.
Should a programming language demarcate different levels of hierarchy in code using whitespace or curly braces?
https://github.com/lihaoyi/Scalite
Do you prefer to name things with snake case, kebab case, camel case, or pascal case?
But beyond coding style, which is often driven by practical aspects of aesthetics such as readability or fitting some internal schema, there is programming as a “pure” art form.
When I say pure here, I don’t mean better or superior, but rather something which is focused primarily on the application of skill for its own sake. “l’art pour l’art” : Art for art’s sake.
It’s arguable that any art can really be made for its own sake. Art is always necessarily embedded in human culture and even formalist attempts at defining a “pure” form of that art are themselves operating within their own set of cultural values and performs some function even as a “pure” aesthetic object, but I think it’s fair to say that attempts at pushing the limits of a medium as a tool of expression and skill is worth looking at. I’m not going to hang a Pollock painting in my house, but I can appreciate the way that someone exploring that part of a medium’s possibility space has opened up new avenues for other artists to use. The loose painterly style of sci-fi conceptual art wouldn’t have been possible without the explorations in abstraction that went before. Also the paint splatters of Pollock’s work are fractal patterns produced by physical algorithms, which presages the Algorists.
What is coding as an art for itself?
Programmers call it code golf. Like normal golf, you try to get to the goal in as few moves as possible. Programmers compete to write extremely concise programs. This isn’t about readability or visual code aesthetics in a normal sense. The code looks ugly! But it pushes the limits of what is possible within the medium, and a skilled execution can be appreciated in the same way of a minimalist sumi-e ink painting of a japanese calligraphy master.
https://www.blowingrockmuseum.org/calendar/sumi-e-painting
One of the best examples of code golf is Dwitter, where people compete to write shaders in less than 140 characters: https://www.dwitter.net/
Shaders are specialized instructions for computers on how to use a graphics card, usually for creating things like 3D graphics or other highly visual effects.
The output of code, the shaders are themselves interesting as a visual aesthetic but the limitations placed on the art form, the requirements of conciseness, are the real art form that people are interested in.
If you thought code normally looks incomprehensible then code golf really pushes that to the limit.
Even more incomprehensible to the layman are esoteric programming languages, like brainfuck, Piet, or the Shakespeare Programming Language.
https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/102448
Brainfuck is basically incomprehensible, with a minimalist syntax that eschews any letters or numbers.
https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html
Piet uses images as code inputs, with each pixel forming part of the command. The result is blocks of color, evocative of Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Language
The Shakespeare Programming Language can be used to create programs that resemble Shakespeare’s plays.
Code golf presents the code itself as art, in addition to its output. Esoteric language takes that up another level of meta, having the language itself be an art form in its own right.
Another category of code as art I think is worth considering is conceptual Operating Systems. Conceptual operating systems express their art form through their architecture and design.
Take “The Screenless Office”, an operating system which is an operating system that doesn’t use a screen. Instead it prints everything out.
This isn’t useful really, but the experiment is evocative and helps the audience perceive operating systems in a new way.
Or take the famous/infamous TempleOS, a idiosyncratic operating system designed by it’s creator to be a new Temple of God, as per his schizophrenic delusions.
TempleOS is not really fit for daily use, and yet, despite its creator’s tragic mental struggles, is a feat of coding skill, likened to “building a skyscraper by yourself.”
On a slightly more practical note, CollapseOS is an operating system designed to run on extremely low end but common hardware (primarily targeting the ubiquitous z80 chip that powers things like gasoline pumps), so in the event of a full societal collapse it could hypothetically be run on scavenged chips.
https://hackaday.com/2019/10/26/collapse-os-an-os-for-when-the-unthinkable-happens/
One reason why I think it’s useful to adopt a broad definition of “art” is because it helps show the multiple layers in which skillfullness is applied. One can write a beautiful song, play it well on an instrument, or select it for the perfect moment of a movie scene or DJ mix. A painting can be skillfully drafted, or speak to a cultural or social tradition, or have some conceptual aspect to how it was created or presented. Code can produce aesthetic output, or the code itself can be written artfully, or the design of the code language itself can be an artform.
Conceptual art as a movement helps illustrate this. Conceptual art as a defined movement arose in the 1960s. It’s a movement within art that treats ideas/concepts as the medium of expression. A conceptual art installation might have no material art object at all, and instead rely on a series of instructions to be executed by those hosting or participating in the exhibit.
When I was still in school for art I was skeptical of conceptual art. It seemed pretentious, unskilled, something people did who didn’t want to dedicate the time necessary to develop a real craft. My view shifted when I experienced a specific art installation. A bunch of people in strange avant garde costumes poured salt in a large contiguous line on the floor. If you stepped over the line, then one of the persons would come up, sweep up the line behind you, and then another would pour more salt around you, putting you again on the exterior of the salt line boundary. I had a realization: oh, it’s like a video game. It’s a system of rules that together form a specific aesthetic experience. One could debate how good that experience is or isn’t. I tend to be more into Meow Wolf than Yoko Ono, but like Pollock mentioned above, the experiments can be valuable for opening our understanding of the potential.
Specifically I think of Yoko Ono’s “Ceiling Painting”, in which a ladder is placed in a room, on the ceiling there is a piece of paper that says “yes” and there is a magnifying glass that the participant can use to read the piece of paper from the top of the ladder.
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/yoko-ono-ceiling-painting-yes-painting
The circle was closed: if instructions given to a human for a specific experience can be artfully conceived, the same is true of instructions given to a computer. Artfullness isn’t something restricted to galleries, it’s something we apply in all aspects of our lives.
Code can be art. Maybe it’s not the artform you find most enticing (dwitter mostly looks like gibberish to me), but understanding how code can be art is still a valuable expansion of one’s perspective on art.
