Hi All,

I'm a programmer by trade, but lately I have become interested in net-art.
Programming as art is a fascinating concept. I did a couple of projects that
attracted some interest. Archean (http://douweosinga.com/projects/archean)
had somewhat of a following, but it makes you wonder, is it art? And more,
what makes a program art, the code or the effect?

In times now long gone, there was no real distinction between artists and
craftsmen. People did there job and if they were really good, they were
artists. Painters or sculpturers were no different in that respect than
carpenters or bakers. Indeed Socrates was a sculpturer before he became a
philosopher. Not as an artist, but just as a way to make a living.

So can you create art in any job? I suppose so. But some jobs have more
possibilties to excell, to be creative and to be original, all aspects we
have learned to associate with art. Against these criteria, art is to be
expected from the best computer programmers. Like Fredericks Brooks wrote in
the Mythical Man Month:

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure
thought-stuff.
He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the
imagination.
Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so
readily
capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

It is not only the abstraction of the work, although this freedom allows the
programmer to use his creativity and to come up with truely new solutions,
to build new stuff in new ways. It is also something different.

A good programmer knows how to judge code not by how it works, but by its
beauty. A program that is beautifully written, it will probably work a lot
better than a program that is not. Indeed, if a novice approaches the master
with a programming solution that is uggly, the master will tell the novice
first that it is uggly and why it is uggly. Only when the novice starts to
protest that it doesn't matter, because it works, will the master will
explain why it doesn't work either.

So is Archean art? In a way it is only the implementation of an algorithm I
discovered/designed. The code is not very beautifull, more a quick hack
actually. But on some level, Rembrandts paintings were also the
implementation of a new algorithm he discovered. Great implementations and a
nice algorithm, that is what an artist makes an artist.

Douwe Osinga
http://douweosinga.com