I am really glad to read your comments about programming not being too hard for artists to learn, about the limitations of commercial packages, and about how software doesn’t stay as hip and current as traditional artistic media and technologies do. These are very important points.

I did want to mention some reasons I haven’t been brandishing my artwork about in defense of the “need to program” (or the benefits of programming):

How come I don’t see any output offered as existence proof for or against the discussant’s positions?

For one thing, it may be that we don’t learn how to program in order to directly generate output, but in order to think more effectively. To take a different example, you might ask a computer scientist why she needed to learn calculus. In some cases (the computer scientist does statistical AI and uses calculus every day) she can point to something very directly and say “this is why,” but even then, that’s really only part of the story. In other cases, the computer scientist doesn’t actually do any continuous mathematics on a regular basis at all. However, being able to think in the way that you think when doing calculus was very helpful as part of a mathematical education, and the person would not be as good as thinker, in the context of computer science, without this background. It wasn’t the case for an artist learning to program when you did, but today a programming education is accessible for college students in any college or major. For anyone who is deeply interested in what computers can do and in what ways of thinking are developed by programming – whatever their field and interest or lack of interest in art – such an education is pretty sure to be worthwhile.

That said, several of my works (such as Winchester’s Nightmare and Ad Verbum) are computer programs and couldn’t have been created without programming. Several others aren’t programs (and many of them aren’t even very structurally interesting as hypertexts) but they attempt different parts of my overall project. Among other things, I’m interested in simulating textual world and in providing (at least in some ways) an automated co-author for a writing and reading experience. My computer-program works are textual interactive experiences rather than visual images, so I can’t quote them as easily, and they wouldn’t be as impressive if I did. (In fact, I must admit that I seldom actually identify myself as an artist, except in the broad sense of the term that includes writers and other creative culture workers, or unless the museum is offering a discount. When I talk about “artists” and computers I don’t mean to restrict the discussion to visual artists.) Still, many people are doing new things in interactive fiction that, whatever their merits will look like over time, certainly require programming. I don’t see any indications (in terms of actual work) that a markup language or some non-programming development environment, rather than a programming language, could manage this sort of thing. So I do think there are some concrete practical reasons, in my case.

First I’m happy to hear you say that anyone can learn to program, particularly when driven by personal / artistic need. I’m hoping those will be words of encouragement for anyone not yet sure if they should undertake learning to program.

I also like how you remind us of the trendiness of new technologies, and the staying power of traditional technologies.

I don’t see anyone saying why they got involved in computing, what they wanted from it. And in the absence of any driving personal need, questions about whether one needs to program or not seem very arbitrary.

For me, from an early age, the computer has been a (and was really my first) creative medium – at age 12 I taught myself programming in BASIC and assembly language on a Commodore 64, and promptly made a slew of puerile little interactive games and short-film-length multiple-sprite animations. In college I got really into video and filmmaking, culminating with making a feature length film at 24, but eventually abandoned that to return to the computer as my primary medium for making creative work.

Why computing? In a nutshell, I see the computer as a medium to discover and invent new forms of art experience, particularly in its capabilities to listen to the user, behave autonomously, and potentially generate new content. For example, lifelike fictional interactive characters, and interactive drama. The computer as my first creative medium is a different starting point, and perhaps has certain ramifications for me, than if I had originally gotten into a different medium, such as drawing, painting, writing or music. I’m not quite sure what those ramifications are, but it probably does affect my outlook and creative process.

Why programming? It seems to me that the only unequivocal argument for programming comes up when you know there’s something you need to find out, but you don’t know just what it is or what it should look like.

I don’t quite agree with that… I think there are new forms of art experience to be discovered / invented that can only be achieved with the computer and programming. It think that’s a slightly different reason than what you’re saying.

If, on the other hand, you see yourself as part of the effort to define the future, then I don’t see that you have any choice but to program your way, in the dark, through an unknown and unknowable landscape.

I tend to agree with this. We should be careful to say that programming is not a requirement for making “important” new media work, nor does programming guarantee that your work will be any good. But I do believe programming will help artists achieve great new things, and therefore it behooves any new media artist to learn and use programming.

My program still functions more as a highly intelligent and talented assistant than as an independent, fully-autonomous artist. I don’t know how far I can go beyond that point — the landscape is still dark and unknown — yet I have very little doubt that the future will include autonomous programs that function as artists.

This is fascinating to me, and the thing that excites and intrigues me the most about AARON. I made a few cursory comments on the relationship of an AI to the human artist in a previous blog post; I’d love for this to be the topic of future blog posts / discussions on grandtextauto.

sorry for the delay. I’ve been stuck in a programming problem and couldn’t let go.

Having myself come to programming after twenty years of painting, I always wondered what would happen when a new crop of young people got their first experience of art-making with the computer — more precisely, with one or another package running on a computer — and teachers in a similar condition. Inevitably, there’s a strong tendency for the individual to take on trust the (entirely questionable) assertion that package X is an art medium, just as in my own youth we tended to take on trust that what we learned in art school defined an art medium.

The difference, of course, is that what we learned in art school had been under examination and continuous revision, by artists, for half a millenium. Package X has been defined by a bunch of hackers who are making relatively uninformed assumptions about what artists do. (Think about the fake brush textures in Photoshop…) Revisions then don’t follow from examination by artists, but from the need to put in more bells and whistles to justify a new release and to sell more copies. Can you think of a single package that was refined and reduced after the first release instead of

expanded?

What is lacking in computer art — one of the things! — is any sophisticated sense of what art IS. Americans — to limit the discussion to this country — never had any idea about history to begin with. (I once mentioned “art between the world wars” in one of my classes and discovered that most of my students didn’t know there had been two.) So it isn’t surprising if the first thing to get dropped from the curriculum when computers come in is art history.

For me*, art is a cultural enterprise and a culture is a continuum through time. Most artists in history have been engaged in pushing back the boundaries of art-making, because the practices of art-making embodied the definition of art and the definitions of art needed revision from time to time. When history disappears, there are no definitions to revise and no boundaries to push back. The individual is in startup mode, guided, in this case, only by what equally uninformed teachers and the commercially motivated packages can tell him.

I was going to ask what are the chances that art will result? But let me ask, rather, what are the chances that the result will have cultural value? (cf, for example, Titian, Monet, Cezanne, Picasso, Bonnard, Pollock…)

*Apropos of which, I should repeat that art has been changing its definitions continuously: never as rapidly as this, but then nothing else has ever changed as rapidly as it is changing today. Perhaps my view that culture is a time-based enterprise is no longer appropriate and art will now be anything that anyone says it is. Problem, then: how come almost nobody outside the computer art community is remotely interested?

Nick, I share your view that programming enlarges our mental capacities by providing enhanced modes for thinking. I remember feeling that I had (metaphorically) become able to juggle six balls without dropping any. I think I’d be prepared to argue that instruction in programming should be mandatory for all students, regardless of discipline. But that’s another question. I was asking for a more tightly-focussed reason for learning it, but of course you’re quite right is asserting that one’s intellectual development is reason enough.