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Where Is The Line Between Programmer And Artist?
frinsore asks: "What jobs are programmers and what are artists? Game creation seems to have blurred the line between the two. While some fall easily into either side, others don't. Where does the map creator fall? They have to know what the engine can do and how the user can interact with it, they also have to make it look pretty and keep it challenging. What about interface design? Giving users as much access as possible while not overwhelming them with details. Do these people land into one camp or another or are they some where in the middle?" This a difficult question to answer and it entirely hinges on how you define art. For me, a piece of code, or an elegant mathematical proof is as much art as a Picasso, or Beethoven's 5th Symphony. As always, feel free to share your thoughts on this subject.
Geeks who see programming as Art (rather than as "an art", which is a very different thing; doctors practice the art of medicine, but that doesn't make them artists) are just pretentious fucks with a painfully overexagerated sense of their own importance.
Well, here in slashdot, i cant hear one news from demoscene front , thats is weird, demoscene is about graphics open minded coding, if you want to see some code == art , go to:
Orange Juice
or..Demonews
If you never seen Stash, you can never imagine what you can do in 64kb!
I want a demoscene slashdot topic-logo !!
NahuelHow many dimensions has the 5th symphony? or Otello?
Victor
Like many people, I feel that programming, or the example given in the story of an "elegant" mathematical proof, is an artistic expression of the creator only in new means. Programming is merely the artist's expression in a form that hasn't been thought of as a media to create art in until recently. Game and web designers are just a few of the positions in computers that blur the line between art and computing.
If sculpture and painting are both art forms, why can't painting and programming both be art forms?
I don't see this as being a "blurring of the lines," merely a statement that there are some people who are both artists and programmers (just as there are people who are both doctors and musicians - does this mean that somehow they are blurring the lines between the medical and musical fields?). Map creators are simply people who have technical skills and artistic skills, and can apply both simultaneously.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I agree with what you're saying, and an example that popped into my head was Leonardo DaVinci. His extensive research on human anatomy was science, not art. While some of his anatomical drawings and sketches might have been creative or beautiful, they ware still not art. However, his rather famous drawing with a male figure inside a circle and a square is indeed art - its end goal was artistic expression.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
An excellent read, check it out.
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Something of a nitpick here... Map designers should not be (and these days are not) programmers. My mom has to know what Word can do, and has to know how make documents look pretty and to the point using Word, but she's neither a programmer nor an artist. It helps very much if the map designer knows what the engine can do and what CPU and memory constraints the project is operating under, but that's about it. Just picked a bad example for your point.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
"All work is creative work if it's done by a thinking mind" said Ayn Rand. I'm reminded of the scene in Atlas Shrugged in which Halley explains to Dagny why he left public life, and goes on to explain why it's foolish for an artist to think that a businessman is the enemy.
We cast spells (programs) to make inanimate objects (computers) do things. And the images and icons associated with computing are sorcery related. Daemons (note archaic spelling), zombies, ghost jobs, magic numbers, wave a dead chicken, etc. My video card is labeled "trident". Hmmm.
And magic is about as reliable now as it was back then too. Usually it does what you expect, but sometimes it blows up for no reason; the daemon runs amok leaving a trail of destruction and data loss in its path. The accident can't be reproduced. And the program/spell can never be provably guranteed to do what it's supposed to do, so the users have to just take it on faith. It could happen again. Who knows?
And sloppy sorcerers eventually end up facing angry mobs with torches and pitchforks. Today these people are the ones calling you on the technical support phone. Hell is still hell. Nothing new here.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you look at a painting, or a work of prose, poetry - basically, it's a piece of structured data, designed to cause the viewer's mind to react in a certain way. Not as cut-and-dried as machine code instructions, but still, data goes into the eye or ear, is processed in the brain, compared to other data, and it evokes a response, emotional, intellectual, etc.
Even your standard basic Maplethorpe photo, or crucifix-in-urine, it's designed to elicit a response.
A strict basic definition of ART is anything man made. So Programming does, in fact qualify. In that sense, and in my opinion, the sense I elucidated above.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Painting and sculpture, especially all this "avant garde" stuff that consists of nothing more than a few splashes
/. last week. It matters to today's rich elite; the rich dot-commer geek.
of paint on a canvas, don't have anything to do with the world people live in at all. "
That's so untrue.
Yes, there is a great deal of cronyism and elitism in the art world today, a lot of ass-kissing and bullshit iconism - in fact, it's been going on for centuries, and the hot new "movements" that arise are almost always based on inconoclasm.
But just because you look at a piece of art and do not understand it does not mean that it's crap. A lot of it DOES have to do with the world people live in. Sometimes, it's something that's limited to "art people" - that is, if you aren't a trained artist, you won't see what it is this artist was trying to communicate. Same is true for your standard basic Calculus text. (only - that Calculus text, it can be argued, will benefit people who don't understand it; the art wont, and that's what I'm talking about with the cronyism).
But most good art, can be viewed by most people, and something conveyed. What does a few splashes of paint on a canvas convey to you? Certainly not something worth $50,000 - that's cronyism again, but doesn't it convey the joy you had when you were 3 and first played with watercolors? or a feeling of motion, recklessness? I see where you're coming from - there's definately a lot of "modern" art that's just way overrated (I have a personal grudge against Picasso), but that kind of thing does have a definate value to society.
Believe it or not, some of the more expensive art recently is coming out of the high-tech arena. Electron micrographs, enlarged and framed - sold to rich dot-commers, or that pay-chair that was on
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'd have to tell him he's wrong.
My first "art" class in college was Art History, and the first item we studied was Venus of Villendorf, which was an earth-goddess statue.
All art is functional. Sometimes it's just functional as eye-candy. Sometime's it's just fucntional as greed satisfaction for the artist and gallery owner.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What if a camera maker designed a camera, with a case of transparent elements so you could see inside to the gear mechanism, to see how well it was designed and built, and how it functions (of course the negative is in an opaque container) -
then decorates the case with gold and fine polished wood accents, and shapes it so that it is both pleasing to look at and ergonomically functional.
It's a tool. To be sure. But then the tool is also a piece of art.
Ever driven a Porsche Boxter? How about a Volvo 1800s. Is it just a car? Or a work of art?
How about a screen-saver program. Is that a work of art? Or a tool?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
On the subject of very analytical color theory guys, who were also emotional and passionate, one particular painter stands out. Van Gogh.
There's the story of his life (-1 ear, suicide, etc.) then there are his paintings, you can tell he learned a lot from Seurat - though they never met.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't understand the penchant for "artist envy" in society. Everyone wants to say how, in some way, they are an "artist." Even Subway, the sandwich chain, started calling its workers "sandwich artists."
Look, the point is, we program. We're good at it. It takes a lot of creativity to solve very difficult obscure programming problems. Accept it as a part of life, and accept it as part of the job of a lot of other people to... but be secure in your accomplishments as a programmer and don't feel you have to prove that you're "more artistic than thou."
-Dean
- I guess modern dance isn't art, as many people don't "get it".
I never said anything that would imply this. Modern dance may not be widely appreciated, but many people who do appreciate it can't dance to save their lives (I happen to be one of these people).Frequently programmers conflict with PHB's who don't understand the creative nature of programming. That said, this "is programming art" discussion looks like an attempt by people who have centered their entire life on a single pursuit to elevate that pursuit and give it wider implications, just to enrich their egos.
- artists working for game companies need to stop deluding themselves into thinking that they are equal talents to the developers.
Amen, brother. And on that note, a term that needs to be expunged from use is HTML Programmer.Oh puh-leez. This is really just a "Programmers: Are we cool or what?" dicusssion. Yeah, programming is cool, but real art appeals to people who aren't artists. If you want to be an artist be an artist. If your self-esteem needs proping up, get therapy.
Define "audience" carefully enough and ANYTHING is art.
Actually maybe that's not a bad thing - the alternative would be to define art by majority opinion. The music industry has shown us what horrors this could bring - imagine whole museums full of velvet Elvis paintings, covered bridges, and flower still-lifes.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
You can screw up making a sculpture so that it falls apart, or botch up a painting such that it's not recognizable. And you can have code that compiles perfectly and still doesn't do anything right. In both cases, the actual "rightness" or "wrongness" of the work is determined by the audience - neither the clay nor the computer particularly care.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Programming (and other mathematical/engineering disciplines) is about building useful structures. The humans doing the building may be partially guided by artistic concerns, but that doesn't make the output "art". The primary purpose is "does it work" not "is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."
I think I will disagree with this one. Though invisible to the untrained eye, I think well-written code or well-designed architecture / functionality has beauty and elegance of its own. I guess it's similar in how literary prose is sometimes considered art.
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I've worked with code that has provoked an emotional response... (and screaming "WTF? What was he thinking?")
Art wasn't usually the word that came to mind...
Art is about conveying beauty and/or a message to an audience (sometimes just the artist himself).
:-)
And programming is about conveying a message to the machine and to other programmers who have to maintain that message. The message to the machine is, these days, very structured and logical. The message to the other programmers can be artistic and contain beauty in several forms: There's the beauty of the elegant, logical structure, beauty of the clear communication of ideas, and beauty of the novel and suprising solution.
The primary purpose is "does it work" not "is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."
You've never programmed on a team, have you?
All graphics artists needs to know a lot about the engines limitations all the time. If you draw textures you need to know about the constraints on textures like:
1. Max texture sizes (to fit in on a 3Dfx card).
2. Main memory set aside for textures.
3. Memory of texture on chip texture cache (limiting number of different textures visible at once).
4. What different texture formats are available (compressed/uncompressed, with and without alpha channels, colordepth etc) and the advantages/disadvantages between them.
5. How mipmapping and interpolation affects the visuality.
And that is just for the texture artist, the 3D artists needs to have a lot more understanding.
So, as you can see, level/map design doesn't demand so much more in technical knowledge than other artist assignments. But it does demand a LOT in imagination and design to make them fun and playable and that's why we have artists doing them.
My experience is that programmers too often design maps that they find technically fascinating, but are boring to play ("look! I've made a level that pushes the engine to the maximum no matter where you look, it's always 20.000 polygons on screen, but no more!").
Btw. I'm a programmer myself, but recognize my limitations in the design department and know that my technical knowledge often gets in the way of my imagination and artistic talents. If you know too much about the underlying architecture you seem to limit yourself.
To me, programming is a craft, and relies on the same degree of discipline that craftsmen in "hardware" (carpentry, model making, etc) rely on.
Also, games design does have roles -- its just that in some cases the game implementor maybe taking on more than one role. One role is that of the progrmamer, who takes the 3-D models and designs how they will react to each other on the screen and what it "means" when one fires an anti-tank rocket at the other. The other is the artist who designs the 3d models and the texture maps and how they "move" within themselves, usually using software that some other programmer wrote. With either a really creative individual, or a really tight budget, game companies will overlap roles among their staff, but its still the staff member performing two separate roles -- programming or 3d art.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Okay, I'm not gonna jump in on this, but this is incorrect. Any emulator can run a piece of code through to see if it halts... or you can run it on the "programming" on the native environment.
Tell that to Alan Turing.
Running the program in an emulator (or 'on the "programming" on the native environment') wouldn't work. How long do you need to run the program before you know that it's halted? If you want a complete proof, go here, or ask your friendly neighborhood CS professor.
I can write a sonnet, and prove that it is correct (ie: a valid sonnet). In fact, I can quite easily write a prigram that can determine whether the input is a valid sonnet or not. Sonnets are quite mechanical. See http://www.english-teaching.co.uk/shakespeare.sonn et.htm.
On the other hand, it's imposssible to create programs that prove all sorts of things about other programs. Here's an excercise for you: write a program that takes a program as input, and proves that it halts.
But that's all moot anyway. Whether a program is 'correct' is at most a required condition of being art; it isn't a sufficient condition. To use the sonnet parallel, a sonnet isn't art just because it follows all of the rules of a sonnet.
If sonnets, music, architecture and photography are art, then so is programming. Yes, some programs aren't very artful, just as some photos, buildings, boy-band-songs, and the sonnet you wrote in grade 9 probably aren't very artful. Programming does require creativity though, and I've occasionally seen code that I would consider to be "a work of art". Like building or bridges though, code's function genrally overshadows the art hidden within, and sometimes much of the artistry is obvious only to the trained eye, much the way gourmet meals are just "nice food" to someone who isn't a connesouir.
I disagree with your concept. To start with if the abstract paint thrown at a canvas from across the room, or the childs crayon scribbles can be concidered art, why cannot anything that is crafted? Does garbage really deserve the clasification of art? What makes good art good? To me if there is some likability to it then to me it might be good, to others good art will be different. But there are certain works that most people will agree is good art. If I make a statment "Boris is a good artist" Most people would agree, some might disagree, but that statement would get a majority that would agree.
"is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."
I am wondering why a program must be ugly? Why can't a program look good and function correctly. I don't think Microsoft made their billions off of making it work right. They went for the "is it nice to look at" and "is it easy to use". So if you go by "does it work" to make people happy then it doesn't seem to be working since windows still dominates the desktop.
I write software for users, and the experience level of the users vary greatly from utter idiot to fairly intellegent. I put allot of effort and code into making it easy for the user to get the job done since they expect it to work to start with. But do I spend the extra time making it easy for the idiot to use otherwise I have to try and teach the idiot to be intellegent? I've found making the program easier and nicer looking pleases the idiot more. While the fairly intelegent would have no problem learning how to use the software, they also like it easy to use and learn.
Programming should be concidered art. Since if it is designed and coded correctly it will be very pleasing to more users. Programs that work but you need weeks to figure it out are not pleasing and are generally thrown away for something that is. One of my personal dislikes of quite a bit of linux software is that to learn it requires vast ammounts of time to figure it all out. Most of the programs lack in documentation beyond a readme file or a man page that was writtin as a reference for someone who already knows how to use it.
Programming requires more than just simple coding to be good. It requires lots of thought on what would someone besides myself want to do, and how would they want to do it? What would make it easier for the user to get the job done? Would one layout work better than another? If I change this little thing will it make it more clear the concept of what the program is doing? I don't like working for the computer, the computer should work for the user. Because it really all boils down to the fact that the users are the ones who determine what is great and what is not.
I see lots of very badly written software that companies pay lots of money for. The sad thing is that the programmers never see the users, or talk to them, or even realize they are there. They seem to think they are the maggots that cause them problems. Maybe if more programmers were to take the time and effort to make it a art work then we would have many more programs that are worth having and using.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
Well said, I've progressed from drawing to painting to music to programming. Although the tools change there is lots of creation involved in all of them.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
I think if you go beyond the "code" aspect, which only the programmers see, there is the art of the program itself. If a game looks good, runs well, and makes people happy then it would be a good game. The programmers succeded in thier job of creating a work that makes the target audience appreiciate their efforts. While I do agree code can be art, the total effect of the code what would be seen by everyone. Very well written code in a very poorly designed interface would not be well recieved by the inteded audience...the users.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
But is code visible to any but the programmer? Art seems to be the end product of the artist, and as such its the end work that is judged by others. Code to me is the tools used, the canvas the brushes, and the paint. But what would make it art is the resulting program, is the program as a whole pleasing? Does it fullfill the need you had for using it? Is it something you want to use/see again? What I put inside the program is the tool that determins the quality of the program, and as such the program could be art, or just another tool to get by with. I've made both, and to me there is a major difference between art and programs when you remove creativity. But add the creativity and programs can be art.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
Your making the assumption that creative people are sane. Well, for me thats debatable, but as for programming it was another form of creation (much easier one in fact). Creating a program is the most enjoyable part, the debuging is the work. Which puts the creating as art and the functionality more towards work. But overall, I still love it.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
define art specifically as that which is _not_ functionally useful, or at least objects for which function is of secondary value.
Does this make Windows art?
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
There was a time when I considered programming an art, because I was told that it was so. I wrestled with that for several years, and saw little or no art in my code, maybe the roots thereof, but nothing more. I came to realize, incorrectly, that it was not an art. I thought then, that it was simply a matter of managing complexity, designing clean interfaces, paint-by-number. In this time, I learned a lot, and I shifted from traditional C to the C++ end of things. And there I stayed, until one day I saw something. I saw that there was something fundamentally wrong in the gung-ho object oriented approach to things. I came to see again the power and complexity that can rise from classic C, and I also saw that C++-style coding had its own major advantages. Except I saw this on an abstract level, and I saw that I had a distinctive style. I played with that idea for months, and came to realize again that there is art in coding: and while some may insist that it is purely about expression of ideas, I see now that it is working within the confines of the language, recognizing the faults in your tendencies, and understanding your own growth. For me, the art is not in the expression. The urge to create, though sated, is not the root of my art. For me, it progresses from change. I learn, and I write... the conversion is almost rote, though by no means skill-less or artless; for me, the greater art is the growth that I experience, the change that programming effects within me. It may seem odd to some, that coding can be more about a personal metamorphosis than a transcription of an idea to a program, but I expect that I am far from alone in this. Is this the true art and beauty in programming? I don't know, nor do I care. In the progression, we grow, and in growth, more becomes evident. So write your code, and write it well. Don't be disillusioned if you don't see something of it yet, those of you just beginning, and those of you who do, I envy your different perceptions. One day, I will find myself.
Engineering becomes art when you are using fixed tools to do something that hasn't been done before. Just as painting a picture uses a fixed set of tools (certain colors and brushes) to create something that hasn't existed before.
I am a Electrical and Computer Engineer. What I found most interesting attending an Engineering College, was the diversity and great creativity of the better engineering students. Many played music, were great artists, or very accoplished writers. Any type of engineering is an art. You have a fixed set of tools and must create something from those limitations. Programing IS art, when done right. This is the same with a brilliant bridge design or an elegant circuit design. All of these are forms of artistic expresion, IMHO.
Day Job: UNIX/Perl Guru/Programmer at Software Company.
Night Job: Professional Bassoonist in Spokane Symphony Orchestra.
B.A. in CS from University of Rochester.
B.M. in Music Performance from the Eastman School of Music.
You make the call.
I really disagree with this statement. Composing music is the ultimate way to express yourself. I would hate to think there is any way to express yourself in a mathematical proof...
You've never seen two people try to prove the same thing, have you?
A lot of things can be aesthetically pleasing - code, buildings (and yes, I think there is architecture-as-art), plumbing, bodies - but there is a difference (with mobility between them) between aesthetically pleasing objects and objects that are designed to be talked about in aesthetic terms.
Now, like the category "game," I think the Wittgensteinian premonition about fuzziness of categories is appropriate here. I would not pretend to have necessary and sufficient conditions for art. But the basis by which even elegant, inspired programming, programming which reveals leaps of insight and intuition, even - is described by art, is IMHO faulty.
As a note, I believe that programming can be art in the context of an art-work, or when it is rehabilitated or recontextualized as art. When someone takes code and exhibits it for its aesthetic properties (even if its only to a limited audience that could understand it) or whether they are doing some conceptual art work that involves programming (I have a work on the back burner that is doing that very thing, using tools that many might think the least qualified to be art-like!) then the programming is, indeed, art.
I prefer to think of programming as an art form that fights back.
But is creativity only an attribute of the artists? Much code is the product of creativity.
I've always thought that the difference between artists and programmers has been along the lines of asthetics and extroversion/introversion.
Most programmers that I work with are comfortable working within a known system (language, OS, etc). They try to make the most of the constraints placed upon them by available resources, time, etc, to come up with the most elegant hack. The question then becomes who is the hack for, and what does it say about the hacker, the cultural system that it was created in, etc.
Artists are limited by their medium(s) of choice, are trying to do much the same - trancend the medium's (system's) constraints to reach new levels of expression.
So I guess it all comes back to creativity and how well you can use your tools of choice.
come on, we all know that the only real way to tell if someone is an artist or a programmer is to look at them.
Artists only wear black turtleneck sweaters, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, drink really strong black coffee, never wash their hair, and whine about how people don't understand them.
Programmers, on the other hand, only wear (free) white t-shirts from hardware vendors, eat anything starchy, never wash their hair, and whine about how people don't understand them.
It's plain as day.
It follws that elegance is not artistic, at least not exclusivly. Code can be elegant, design can be elegant, a pear can be elegant, but artistic...? Well...
It brings up the age-old discussion of the creator's (artist, hacker, etc) intention vs the viewer's (patron, user, etc) perception.
I've always thought of art as "that stuff that I can't do."
Ergo, programming can't be art, right?
Seriously, I don't think all programming is art.
Besides the machine-generated gunk that is practically a necessity in the Windows programming world these days, we've all seen code that is to programming what an explosion in a paint factory is to Picasso.
I've also seen some very well thought out and executed systems that I probably would consider art or nearly so.
Maybe not such a big difference - I looked up "engineer" in three different dictionaries once. All had similar definitions that engineering was the "ART of designing, operating and using machinery." Some parts of a game design may be more of a fine art, and some may be more of a practical art, but all who contributeare artists, choosing their own elements of style out of the infinite possibilities before them.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
I have friends coming from both sides of the fence that are either programmers or designers, and in my experience programmers are more able to fulfill both sides better than designers.
It could be that the "design factor" is more easily incorporated into the logical procedure of a programmer than the other way round.
For example, the majority of programmers I met have very good writing skills, maybe derived from reading and producing documentation, but the funny thing is that their writing has an outstanding literary quality that goes far beyond the technical aspect. Most of them are very well read, very well spoken and have a clear method of portraying an idea.
Also, a coder seems to be very comfortable handling any element of a project. I could be generalizing from personal experience, but the ones I know, use image editing software and typography equally or better than their design counterparts. Same thing with sound and video editing software.
Of course a designer potentially has a better approach towards interface design and a refined idea of how to set the tone of a project and give it a visually professional quality. But the truth is that most designers lack the originality or the know-how to simplify the creative process and tend to overstuff an idea with irrelevant and meaningless input, but that's another story.
When it comes to crossing the fence, designers are not very well prepared to meet the demands. I've rarely seen a designer who could script client or server side code into a template in a clean, efficient and not redundant way. Or Telnet to a *NIX server and know basic Unix navigation syntax, or know how to change directory permissions, or know a bit of.htaccess, or have a minimal understanding of server-client communication.
It would be really wonderful if designers could bridge the gap and cross over. It is needless to say that I don't think a designer should know the nuts and bolts of programming in order to stop being one, but it would help enormously -specifically in a small environment- if a designer could tweak some PHP and Javascript code, could upload into a server and could handle the sine qua non of the other side.
"Wit is the epitaph of an emotion." -Nietzsche
how about the technical skills required to produce fine art? Color theory, perspective, foreshortening, brushwork, etc. Are we to also call artists engineers?
The question was pretty loaded.
Lost pointers of Babylon,
The great pyramid schemes
...
You can look at code from any number of perspectives, but for the sake of argument allow me to shoehorn them into two categories. Some view programming as an art, something that just "happens" and is totally dependent on the genius of the "artist". No process is considered. The individual is working on inspiration. A fly by the seat of the pants approach. A few remarkable individuals seem to get away with this, and do quite well. For a while anyway.
Others view the field as entirely an engineering discipline. Even GUI design falls under the realm of "Human Factors Engineering". Process is king here. Every change is backed up by a change order and source code control.
Over time, my view has moved steadily towards the engineering end of the spectrum. Big surprise. I've seen too much effort wasted to buy the "I'm an artist; leave me alone" attitude. I think it's a cop-out supported by people with a short attention span who don't want to work with a team.
True art (painting, music, etc.) is a transfer function: taking life's experiences and expressing them through universally recognized symbols. Really now, how do you express emotion (pain, love, joy) in a line of working code.
We're builing logic machines here. Correctness matters. That's not to say a design can't be "elegant". Indeed some of the best engineering (bridges, towers) is very aesthetically pleasing. But that doesn't make it art.
Now when it comes to games, a lot of it is art; there's character development, the layout of the scenes, etc. I suppose you could consider the creation of that as art. But the encoding of that into computer instructions is engineering precisely because it has to be correct (or it won't even compile).
Art is art in the eye of the beholder. Art is certainly very subjective, but just because art is subjective does not mean that anything can fly under the banner of subjectivity, free from any morality. I do agree with the previous poster, insofar as I agree that there are a large number of hacks out there today, that cater more to what is regarded as being "modern", then what either THEY (in my opinion) or the greater PUBLIC (well established) care about. I question the legitimacy of a group of select people that, at worst, appeal just to themselves and, at best, to a select group of so-called artistic elites.
Even if all of these so-called artists actually _believe_ in what they do, if being an artist is just about pleasing oneself, then what makes the artist any more noble than the guy that literally jerks off all day long? Or the rich playboy? Or what have you...
This is not to say that I, or any other individual, can sit back and declare decisively what is and what is not art. Rather, it is a legitimate question, designed to make those self-described "artists" question themselves.
Its and it's are not interchangable words. What's more, the misuse of such a common word annoys me and others. Clearly if you care about grammar and are incapable of using the correct word, you're either irrational or suffered from a poor education.
;)
Word to the wise, those in glass houses should not throw stones. Especially when you've got about 50 of them for me to target
For me, a piece of code, or an elegant mathematical proof is as much art as a Picasso, or Beethoven's 5th Symphony.
:))
I think you are blurring the line separating efficiency and creativity.
With any programming problem, if you work on it long enough, the logic will eventually turn out the most efficient code ever written. You can work on a piece of art for decades and not turn it into a masterpiece.
Creativity is far more dependent on short bursts of insight than logical thinking.
(This is coming from a programmer-turned-artist.
Holy jamoley!
I sure hope you're right! Bring on the ladies...
(nmerriam@ARTboy.org)
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Programming (and other mathematical/engineering disciplines) is about building useful structures. The humans doing the building may be partially guided by artistic concerns, but that doesn't make the output "art". The primary purpose is "does it work" not "is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."
However, a great deal of "does it work" is effected by "is it nice to look at" and "is it elegant."
Especially in an open source model, you MUST make sure your code is a joy to hack on, or any good programmer would simply decide to to throw it all away and start over. For that matter, you MUST make your user interface elegant if you want other people to use your program.
I've worked on projects that ranged from the architectural equivilent of a six story house of sticks (that could be blown down if you looked at it funny) to projects that felt as through Frank Lloyd Wright was reincarnated as a programmer. Not only did the code work as it was supposed to, but you got the feeling you were getting better just by reading it. Guess which ones I put more energy towards? Guess which ones thived and which ones died months later?
After years of programming I'd have to say that all programming is art, atleast in the vein that it is a creative endevor much like writing. It's just that some examples are much better artistically than others. As with all art, some is excelent, some is good, and then you have the trash that is without merrit. By nature, art is in the eye of the beholder. Each observer has his or her own ideas as to what constitutes true art. Nobody is correct, it's all relative.
I have seen some programs that have artisic uses (digital recording and graphics programs for example) but a computer program is closer to a camera than a photograph.
So just what is a fractile landscape generator?
Can you really say? Who is the artist of what work? Can we separate them out? The programmer as artist of the clever code to generate the landscape, or the user who manipulates the controls to generate a new landscape image?
You know, some instrument makers are considered artists for the quality of the job they do making the instrument. How would this apply to programmers?
More and more people care more about if it works right that if it looks pretty. A prime example is Everquest, a mmorpg. As a player, sure I want it to look pretty, but I would rather have a game that works right than have to sit there and stare at a pretty Giant that has an arm in his head because the programmer didn't bother to check the code for glitches.
I can only please one person a day. Today is not your day, and tomorrow does not look good either.
My HP Scanjet 5100C play Beethoven's Symphony No.9 couple of times when I use xsane to get it working, but it seems it only work with win95. Even if I can get Win95, I wouldn't even bother booting it just to use the scanner. HP!!! *sigh* Now the device is completely broken.
this cheap parport scanner was designed by engineers with very artistic hearts. IMHO an artist/programmer clear definition:
Programmer: D. Becker or D. E. Knuth
Artist: D. Duck employed by HP to design this fucking scanner.
Any question based on the assumption that you can define art is a bogus question. It inevitably degrades into an argument designed to insult technical people or "artists", whatever they are. Personally, I've happy with the concept of "craft". Art is subjective, not objective. If you over-analyse this issue you end up arguing a school bus driver is an artist because they might show creativity in the route they take each day. Or you argue semantics - who cares about that? I'd say - just get on with your programming!
I see a big distinction between engineering and Arts. Engineering main purpose is usefulness. Art main purpose is any of the following: beauty, fun, elegance but not usefulness. Now, you might find usefulness with a piece of art but that's not it's main purpose. The same goes for engineering it has to be efficient, useful but beauty is not the main purpose (it can be a secondary one however).
Mario.
Actually, "fish" are a fairly easy group to identify. I agree with your other points, but to say that fish are an ill-defined category is quite incorrect.
I don't see the parallel.
VB and assembler are two different languages for programming (one high level, one low level.) They aren't subsets of each other, but they do fall in the same set as "languages".
What's being discussed is if programming is a subset of art. If it's not a subset, then by your analogy I would assume they belong to another higher set. What set would this be?
As for writing mathematical proofs, that strikes me as a unique sort of activity that has hardly anything in common with either the arts or craft work. That I might find a particular proof "beautiful" in the same way I find a painting, the Grand Canyon or the night sky beautiful doesn't mean all those things are works of art.
Programming can also be art, like a mathematical problem or solution. Normally we won't be able to look at the code, so we can't really tell if it's a mess or an artwork. That is IMO the only difference when it comes to programmers and the rest of the group. End the end, they can all be artists.
This same situation comes up in many other, more traditional artistic fields. I think looking at one of these will help clarify the situation.
:)
Artists have a wide array of tools and mediums that they use to create art. For example, painters need their many colors of oil-paints, brushes, and canvas (or such). Now although the people that make these tools have to have some understanding of the art and how they are going to be used, they do not have to be good the art and that is not their primary skill. What they are most skilled in is the design and construction of brushes, chemical knowledge of how pigments mix and dry, technical knowledge of the absosion, texture, and tactile feedback of the brushes and canvas. They are not artists, they are craftsman.
Likewise, the artists know something about the properties and limitations of their mediums and tools. However, their expertice lies in using the meduim to create art, not in creation of the medium itself.
This has almost a direct corespondence to the world of game design. The engine designers are craftmen, whose major concern lies in technical issues of performance and quality. The level designers are artists, and although they have to know about the limitations of the engine, this does not make them a programmer.
Although a single person may be able to fill both these roles, they are seperate roles, and specializing in one (while still having some knowledge of the other) will allow one to attain a much higher level of skill in that area.
The other misconception is that anything is beutiful is art. This is really a matter of definition than anything else, but the definition that most people use is that art must be appreciable to the general public.
Therefore, I do think that a well-produced game is a work of art. It is something that is designed to produce emotional responces in the player. Furthermore, anyone can enjoy it not just someone from the same field.
However, programmers, mathmatitions, engineers and such do not fit in to the definition of artists, but that doesn't make their work any less beutiful or valuable. (even if they cant spell beutiful
So for instance:
Asking "where do coders and artists fit in" these days is a tricky question. In the very best teams there's always some crossover knowledge to be gained. What counts is your attitude: can I work within these limits that the other people have set me?
If you're not only willing to learn all you can about your own discipline but as much as possible about the others, you'll be able to solve more problems when the crunch comes.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Art is about conveying beauty and/or a message to an audience (sometimes just the artist himself).
Programming (and other mathematical/engineering disciplines) is about building useful structures. The humans doing the building may be partially guided by artistic concerns, but that doesn't make the output "art". The primary purpose is "does it work" not "is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."
The primary purpose of a piece of code may be to perform a function, but that doesn't mean that the programmer may not have also put substantial effort into it as a piece of art - the two are not mutually exclusive.
There may be some programmers (well OK, there are many) who don't care what their code looks like, but there are many others who care a great deal. I personally put a lot of artistic effort into my work - since pleasing me is just as important to me as meeting my externally imposed goals.
I try to achieve an impressionististic minimalism in my code, where function is suggested by form and where the code has a fractal like property of having a similar and appropriate level of complexity at whatever level of detail you look at it. These may also be good engineering practices, but my motivation is as much aesthetic.
Wow. Very well put.
And to think, i was about to respond to that comment with a "bullshit!"
I agree whole heartedly.
-ben.c
* Every artist I know can barely afford ~$200 a month rent and eats a lot of rice.-- Unless you mean "to know personally," you must not watch many popular movies or listen to any popular music.
* A piece of software only does one thing.-- maybe, maybe not. Depends a lot on the software. Still, if a movie can be art (and if you don't consider film to be an artform, then ok, neither can code be), then it's only a hop-skip-and-a-jump to computer generated art. If a picture or animation generated by a computer can be art, then could not one think of the algorithm that perfectly and completely describes the picture or animation or sound also be a form of art?
You may say "no!" That's ok. I don't think art is something you can really quantify: something is only art if the observer considers it so. There is no right or wrong, really.
Quit posing. Quit fantasizing about how many demographics you can span.
Quit sighting cliche examples of supposed high-brow enlightenment: an elegant mathematical proof, a Beethoven symphony, fucking swan lake, or gotterdamurung. Gag.-- and to that i say, quit worrying about how other people think of themselves. Quit telling them what they are or what they are not. If you have proof present it. Otherwise, let people think this through themselves. There's no point in belittling them.
-ben.c
So, basically, this comes down to a question of the end versus the means. Take construction as an anology. There's architecture out there that the greater mass of people out there can appreciate - think the Notre Dame cathedral. There are also totally forgettable buildings whose primary purpose is functionality - tract housing, most schools, etc. They're all made out of some type of rock, which by itself (in most cases) isn't really that impressive, though a piece of granite probably looks neater than a uniform slab of concrete.
Now let's carry this metaphor over to programming. There's programs out there that ARE moving and incredible to see in action (demos, certain games, etc) that can be appreciated by a larger audience of programs. There's also programs that serve a mainly functional purpose (packet routing software, etc). Now, just like an architect could appreciate innovative techniques used to make a building that ultimately looks bland, us programmers can appreciate elegant code and neat algorithms, even if the end result isn't visually impressive.
There's art that the masses "get", and then there's art that only the artists fully comprehend. Take Perl - the first time I saw how easy it was to do text manipulation with it (as opposed to C or some such), I fell out of my chair.
THAT's art.
---------
---------
Get back to me when my brain starts working.
I think that too often people concider programming this large blob of mathamatical giberish that requires no more thought than calculating pi.
I find that coding is rather a matamatical art. It is an expression of my thought process expressed not on a canvas, but in code. It may be analytical, but it is not without creativity.
Programming paradigms are like a style of painting. One moves in and everyone loves it, but get bored, to find the next big thing.
On a side note, Too often has mathamatics and art been concidered polar to one another. I would rather thing that it is more of a circle, where the poles connect, but maybe not as frequently are the rest of the circle. It is a rare gap filled by those who can really get both areas. Many famous scientists and philosopers alike were members of this unique train of thought.
One could say that it was that this rarety of thinking that made creation of new invention so remarkable.
Bye!
Would you rather go to a doctor or a naturopath? The comparision to games is invalid, just because the lines are blurred and the work environments compressed together. In terms of finding a seemily beautiful solution to a problem, you don't think that some surgery could be declared artistic? A legal argument? Please.
Most of these great artistic solutions are code maintenance nightmares. Good code comes from solid engineering principles.
No, the answer to the question "what makes a person an artist?" is:
"possession of, and demonstrated willingness to wear, a beret".
=]
grib.
maybe
That's a terrible test. Emotional response depends at least as much on the emotional state of the viewer as it does on external stimulus (say, viewing a painting or listening to a piece of music).
The same person might be moved to tears by a song on one occasion, but barely notice the same song on another. Depends what mood they're in. Does this mean that the song was art, but now is not?
grib.
maybe
"Although one may successfully argue that a brilliant proof or algorithm is art, I don't think that the converse can be shown."
What exactly is the converse? That a piece of art is a 'brilliant proof or algorithm'? That's either sloppy thinking or sloppy phrasing. I'll assume the latter.
Maybe it's just me, but the idea that art does or does not require 'rigor' strikes me as bizarre. You can be painstakingly rigorous and create art, you can be entirely random and create art.
The idea that 'a piece of code' -- even if I assume you mean a non-trivial piece code -- requires rigor is equally bizarre. I once wrote a working MIDI file generator, the source code of which made experienced programmers cry and rend their garments. It's hard to imagine anything less rigorous! But it worked... so in what sense did it _require_ rigor?
Rigor may be desirable, but it's not _necessarily_ required for code, mathematics _or_ art.
grib.
maybe
One might define anything dealing with programming as an art not entirely unlike visual design, architecture, literary composition, or musical composition.
;)
One might look at it this way: computers can't entirely write their own programs, given a problem (task) that needs a solution (programmed routine). At least, not yet anyway. Humans, however, don't think like computers when they write programs. There is no brute force in writing a program, there is no deterministic solution mapped out for every programming task. Instead, we take a general idea - that is, what we want a program to do - and sculpt it with the available tools. While assembly language programmers are more similar to engineers operating a machine... high level programmers are abstracted far enough from the absolute technical details such that programming constructs are more like ideas of execution flow, rather than absolute commands.
This is the great thing about game programming, though. If you're more of an artist and less of an engineer, and you enjoy working with a broad range of creative fields, game programming is almost perfect. You get to combine programming, visual elements, artwork, architechture, musical elements, strategic planning, competitive balancing, storytelling, etc. all into one project. Take another field of programming... say, AI... and although it's also a creative field, it's not very broad - it's kind of like how a painting on its own cannot have a song or a love story attached to it.
Of course, the biggest problems with game programming are dragged in from their respective artistic components - you need to be a lot smarter than your average Joe Shmoe job (the programming and strategy aspects), you need specialized knowledge (programming, game rule design), you may wind up starving (visual and musical arts), getting it all to match up together is not a simple task (programming, visual arts, musical arts, and storytelling)... and other pitfalls. For example:
It needs to run acceptably fast, no music at all is better than having a shitty soundtrack, you can't give everyone a BFG to start, it can't be the fiftieth game about fantasy ninja American-soldier magician mercenaries shooting up all the Communist alien demonic Orcs with crates, you gotta stay away from making models with black belts and brown shoes, you can't write lines like "All your base are belong to us", you should not have to play it 26 hours straight through to beat it without being able to save it, it needs to be compatible with as much hardware as possible, it should not require that you hold down Q, L, F6, and the right mouse button for any cruicial game action, it needs to fit on a CD-ROM, and it needs to be in a pretty box.
Smooth Internet multiplayer mode, proximity mines, and a sniper rifle with magnified scope are nice extras.
If you are programming the solution to a known problem, your usual accounting/stock control/etc applications, then it's just engineering. You have room for adding your personal touch to it, just like any engineer have, but it's not quite art.
Other programs, like new problems, new algorithms for old problems or programs in which your "personal touch" is a large part of how the program works, well, *that* is art.
(8-DCS)
...has always had to deal with the creative aspects. As an Interactive Web Developer I am constantly faced with creative descions that need to be made and I feel I am not the one to be asking. I have never had a problem implementing any sort of animation that the creative department assigns, but to make descisions as to how it should look or act isn't a programmers responsibility (and if the person knows any better they wouldn't make it so).
We're not god. Not only are we human but we are sometimes forced to become the devil himself. We're not god
And if that is not the geekiest way of explaining my position, I don't know what is.
I started out as a physics major at university, with the plan of specialising in the theoretical, particle physics end of things. But I came to discover that what I loved about it was the beauty of the underlying mathematics.
Now I work much more closely with that math, in my job as a programmer. Not as close, perhaps, as I would like, since I spend a disproportionate amount of time writing code to spew HTML, rather than creating beautiful visual effects to accompany my friends' musical endeavors, but as time goes on, I expect the scales to continue to tip in favor of the art.
However, I do feel that any elegantly written piece of code, or design architecture, can be beautiful, in an artistic sense. It's all about whether the viewer has been trained to appreciate it. I don't care for opera or ballet -- they don't mean anything to me. But I'm sure that if I took the time to learn the "language" in which they are communicating, I would be able to appreciate the beauty.
Disclaimer: I enjoy many genres of music, from classical to trance, from White Zombie and Lords of Acid to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. I paint. I built a deck in my backyard, of my own design. It still stands, years later, and looks good. I write, fiction and otherwise.
-- gold23
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
That's a big generalisation. I think many traditional artists would be unhappy if you said that to them.
A compiler isn't really evil. It's not artistic either. It's can be an artists tool though, just like a paintbrush is.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
IMHO, especially when it comes to the web, the best designers wouldn't make good programmers and the best programmers wouldn't make good designers.
BUT it's important for the programmers to know how the design process works, in order to accomodate the design. It's equally important for the designers to know, basically, how the programming infrastructure (in my case, HTML tables, CSS, and limits) works.
I'm a good programmer. But not such a great designer. And I've worked with great designers who couldn't code a line if they copied and pasted it out of the help file, but they know HOW it worked.
Good description of mathematics I think (especially higher math, with applications only in string physics
So is the Mona Lisa art or not? If you can't define it, it becomes really difficult to talk about!
A programmer creates a functional tool for the user. An artist creates a sense of visual and aural "cohesiveness" that defines the feel of the application.
This seems to be a simple explanation, but I think it defines the boundaries well, especially if you think of it in the way architects think about their work. Consider the phrase we all learned from architecture "Form Follows Function" and apply that to the computer world. The programmer creates the functions. The artist creates the form.
Now, those two roles may be handled by the same person and usually it is the programmer who ends up creating the "form" around his own "functions" (visual interfaces, menus, etc...) But oftentimes, there is a clear distinction between the two that often comes about from the list of skills needed for the task at hand. The programming must be done by someone who knows how to program. The "art" must be done by someone with artistic skills.
Yes, we can say the program code can be considered "art" but I don't believe that's what this question was talking about.
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
>[snip] or calling a particularly well-constructed brick wall art.
found this one interesting. I sometimes like to compare coding to architecture. An architect CAN be an artist (Gaudi, Rietveld), but isn't necessarily. Also, architecture can be a science since thinking up a building 150 meters high that won't topple at the third gust of wind can be quite a challenge (probably.. I'm no architect). Sure.. the brick wall isn't art (usually it isn't, art's a weird thing at times), but Gaudi's cathedral is definately a work of art. Where do architects draw the line? I have no idea.. but I think the situation is similar.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Yes code is art, but more often than not the wrong kind of code is seen as art. Some people think "art" is using every obscure language feature to pack as much as possible onto one line. Others think it is getting creative with the preprocessor. Usually these are kids who don't know the language and are still excited by newly discovered features.
If you don't have to think too hard about a piece of code to re-use it then it's art.
REAL art code is obvious, even to a VB programmer. Anyone can read it and understand it easily. It's efficient, but does not sacrifice readability for cycles unless it absolutely has to. And it even looks nice.
It seems like many people are addressing what appears to be stereotypes of artists and programmers. e.g. programmers make money, artists don't.
In the game industry these days, a career path that has emerged is the Technical Artist, or Art Tech in some companies. These people are usually go betweens for artists and programmers and has an understanding of the programming side as well as the artistic side. The result is that they can help the programmers understand exactly what tools are necessary for artists and they can help artists understand the tools that they use as well as the limitations that the artists need to work within.
This is a particular career path that I am interested in and as such, I have a traditional art degree, but also have experience programming in various languages. I don't wish to program for a living, and drawing day in and day out doesn't appeal to me either. Technical Artists help people on both sides of the fence, making game development more efficient.
Art should invoke an emotonal responce.
A photograph can show an event in time and/or show
the detail of an object. For a photograph to
be art it must provoke an emotonal responce in
the viewer.
I have seen some programs that have artisic uses
(digital recording and graphics programs for example) but a computer program is closer to a
camera than a photograph.
AdFuel
That particular drawing had an end goal of showing the specific mathematical proportions of body parts. It illustrated in a clear, easy-to-understand manner the mathematical relationships that exist in the skeletal structure of humans. Yes, it was secondarily art, but the art was only a means of easily conveying the ideas in a media form that many could understand.
I'm by no means saying that a brilliant scientist's work is not art, nor he an artist. The piece of work was indeed art, but was not primarily or predominantly art. That is one often-found difference between analytical art (such as elegant code, an impressive bridge, or blueprints for a house) and 'pure' art (painting, sculpture, music).
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
I myself have been the subject of many verbal assaults by people who think I should just pick a single field and stick with it. The problem is there are many people out there like me who have the ability to do more than one thing, and as time goes on there's going to be more of us.
- Milo Hyson
The problem with this statement is something that this particular /. thread has superbly pointed out. The definition of art is highly subjective. Period.
- Milo Hyson
I have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, any code that remotely comes close to "true art" in its impact on the human spirit.
Listen to Beethoven's Ode To Joy (the 9th for you peasants out there), you don't need a degree in music to be moved by this work. The most finely crafted code, however, requires a deep understanding of the programming language and the platform it is targeted for to appreciate it.
True art has the ability to move one without one needing to fully understand it.
-- Will program for bandwidth
An artists "paints" with his mouse, chisel, hammer, chainsaw (dam, I love those ice sculptures!)
;-)"
;-) Quake 3... mmmm.
A programmer has a screen as their "canvas", with his/her "brushes" being their "keyboard." A well crafted API, with clean, commented code is just as much a thing of beauty.
Here is the key: *BOTH people create something!
While code isn't as visible to the consumer, it can still be elegant.
As a programmer, we constently changing between the macroscopic design, and microscopic implementation. I would imagine artists go thru the same thought process. Yes? No?
In that one in a million time when the artist's ego get out of line, a funny respons is: "You can have game without artists, but you can't have a [computer] game without artists
And of course when the programmer's ego's get too big, a good response is: "Programmer art. Ugh. For the love of my eyes, no!"
Seriously, artists need coders, coders need artists. Without the other, you got, crappy games. (Yes, I love text adventures, but I want my eye candy now
*shrugs* -- just a game programmer...
Look, in my mind, the differences between the two are like the differences between "plumber" and "electrician"; there's different sets of knowledge that go into each, but the actual jobs are very similar: they both build. So do artists, so do programmers. I look at the whole of game building as "building games", which includes putting together the artwork, coding, etc.
Look, big picture overview: artists are people who create. Coders are people who create. they just create with different goals in mind, when they're seperate. But, when you're building something that includes both, the goal for both is the same, so the people working on it should be conversant in both. It's a good thing, and it's really nice to be able to stretch the brain in both creativity and logical thinking.
Whatever you do... don't read this.
there are a lot of things you learn and see in college when doing CS that are nothing short of art! Its much like paintings and music... you uappreciate what you can understand. Sometimes things just look like dumb lines of abstract paint...... well maybe you have not got the artists eye about colors and emotions! Just like that what may seem like scribles on the computer screen and a whole bunch of parentheses to an averge computer users looks to me like an awesome bit of code in Scheme! its a matter of how you look at it...... and BY THE WAY, a lot of coders spend considerable ammounts of time (at least when in college) to make their code sexy!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
My code is my poetry. Therefore, I am a poet. Poetry is a form of art. I am an artist.
Art can be *done* using programming, just as it can use acrylics, or sound, or analogy and metaphor. But is most programming art? Hardly. Are house painters creating art, or filling in blank spaces?
l ov er/chap6.html
Creativity is all about psychodynamics...
http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/g
Da Blog
There's a program here at the University of Florida that is trying to take on this issue. There is a special major being presented to students that allows them to develope their artistic talents along with their engineer skills.
Allowing you to take two approaches to the major, you can take a art track with a fair amount of engineer courses or a engineer track with a fair amount of art courses.
To find out more: http://www.dwi.ufl.edu
... is constrained art. Just like when you paint a painting you have to put it all on the canvas, otherwise it isn't a painting anymore. Same with interface design. The implementation of that interface is programming, though.
Hey, Mr. Artist, I see you're taking a break. It must be to go get me that Dr. Pepper I'm thirsty for. Hurry up, so you can get back to work again.
--
Twivel
Well, there is a further classification if you will in art. Artist and artisain. Art isn't something that is beautiful to look at, it must have "meaning" to be art Much art has no beauty, maybe it is even sickening, but it has a message for the viewer. An artisain is interested in conveying beauty/elegance. This is why art movements like abstract expressionism are art, and wildlife "art" isn't. So I would disagree that code could ever be art, maybe it's sometimes beautiful, but its not art. So if video game art has to have meaning to be art, are the people creating it artists? Probably not. They are artisians. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it is really an important distinction for society to have.
>> A frame - so you know where the art ends and the world begins. Otherwise how can you tell a painting from "that shit on the wall." <<
That actually happened to me once. It was one of those funky 3D art displays in a run-down college. While scrolling around the peices, I came across an open thermostat. I studied it for about 8 seconds until I realized that it was not meant to be part of the show.
Table-ized A.I.
Map making, interface design...that's funny, most of that work is done by neither programmer or artist these days. Instead, they're done by Designers.
Programming is perceived as something stubborn, boring and uncreative by 'outsiders'. Programmers like to compare good code with art to counter this. Somehow we all like to see our efforts being admired, there is nothing wrong about this.
However, no matter how you look at it, code is no art, and will never be. It has a function, it makes sense and it serves a particular purpose. Art seldomly serves anything, and I would even say that this is one of it's main features.
Coding is an extremely creative activity but this doesn't make the programmer an artist.
Of course the question can't be answered in such a simplistic way, and there are many simliarities between coders and artists, but this doesn't make the 'product' (=code) art.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The primary purpose is "does it work" not "is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."
:-)
You've never programmed on a team, have you?
I know what you're saying, but even so - if that code doesn't compile/work etc. you have failed. If it was really about 'is it elegant' or 'is it nice to look at', it would just be a collection of functions and strings that may or may not do something. The primary purpose is to make it work.
The problem is that here the line is blurry, because some people would argue that beauty is seeing ingenious ways to *make something work*. However I wouldn't consider it art. I'd consider it fine and ingenious engineering.
I feel like Motzart, my code will never be appreciated until 100+ years after I am dead. :(
;) Code Monkeys? Spaghetti Programmers? Virtual Developers? What?
Trying to please pointy haired bosses and other management types while trying to also write good code to avoid memory leaks and sluggishness is an artform in itself. I am one of those rare individuals that can do it.
The ones that can code faster than me, write sloppy code and provide no comments. They get praise for finishing before deadlines and make the rest of us coders look bad when they tally up how long it takes to work on a project. Thing is, I don't have to go back and correct my code 12 times before I get it working the way they want it like the other programmers do. Yet it seems my employer likes the fast and sloppy style because they can get more done in less time. Forget that it leaks memory worse than a Microsoft operating system, and no other programmer can figure it out because they didn't document it at all. At least with my code, someone can figure out what I was doing because I use naming conventions and source code comments and write documents on what the program is supposed to do.
So what should we call the quick and dirty programmers that management seems to like so much? They aren't really artists, unless they are the Jackson Pollocks of the programmer set?
This one is easy. Hacker is person who likes to hack code/computer/security etc, and cracer is a dry thin baked bread product. It should not be too hard to distinguish those.
Im not a music major and I sing off key but I can listen and say hey - that sounds damn good! I can draw stick people okay but I can look at Rembrant and go bad ass. However, I get through calc and I look at math like a big pain in the ASS! I see no beauty in code even though ive written some. How is Joe Blow gonna feel looking at the source tree? Doesnt seem like art (to me)
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Are construction workers artists?
Construction workers take their work seriously. The results are often aethsetically appealing.
Programmers are the same way. They want their code to be readable, to use clean abstractions etc.
On the other hand when you look at Van Goughes painting of Crows flying over a field of wheat you feel a pain inside. It's beautifull. You look at it and you think you understand his loneliness.
Code doesn't move me the same way.
does art need to convay emotion?
what about photorealism? is really depends on your defintion doesn't it? if it's just a creative process, well then sure, creating software could be art.
but is code art? i bet there's some artist that has taken large chunks of code and made it look very pretty. DeCSS shirts anyone?
maybe even the movie.. ah what was that called... "Antitrust". even hackers. but it wasn't code, it just looked like code. art with symbols.
anyway, i'm sure it's something we've thought about, for sure the answer is subjective, it really depends on how you would define what art is.
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
I think it's a good idea for the programmer to practice art. Programmers aren't inherently non-artists... many just tend to spend a lot more time practicing coding and a lot less time drawing. Anyone can play around with graphics software and music composition on a computer. Not only does this make one better able to create a complete product on their own, but it would also be great practice in being part of a team where the work *does* need to be split up. If you have such people working on all aspects of a product, they can better understand and more quickly deal with others' aspects of a project. When anyone has a really brilliant inspiration, it's best to minimize the boundaries preventing them from realizing that, even if it's not their *supposed* area of expertise.
Practically, though, I don't suppose you run across a lot of experts covering such a wide range. I myself focus more on programming (which is why my Scrolling Game Development Kit doesn't come with a whole lot of sound effects or graphics). I think what one has to do is just find people with the appropriate experience. Maybe you can't expect a particular artist to design map graphics because of the technical limitations involved (maybe the particular artist can't work in the confines of graphics that have to be tilable). And maybe the programmer isn't qualified to draw anything. The terms "Artist" and "programmer" don't necessarily fit well into every project and maybe you need to be asking for "technical artists" or "texture designers". Maybe your map editor should have some concept of plot... fitting the world into an exciting story. The categories of people you look for need to fit the project. I think the biggest distance between any "artist" and any "programmer" is simply practice. Ideally the person who is designing maps for a new project is someone who has practiced exactly that and knows how to deal with the technical and artistic aspects of that task.
The greek term techne substantially covers the ground being argued here. The key aspect which joins these seemingly disparate sets is the practice of artifice in its most general sense. The term *artificial* is also helpful here, signifying as it does *man-made* We're makers. This level of generality bleeds into insignificance, I'll admit, but there is a grain of truth in the assertion.
illegitimii non ingravare
The truth, of course, lies very much in the middle. This is a world of gray and color.
The problem, I think, is the tendency to want to label things, i.e. use nouns, when really what are called for are verbs. Being as opposed to doing. And there's a middleground to those too.
I took electrical engineering in school, I currently program, and write & perform music. I know I'm not alone.
Art is that which inspire you to become reach new heights. Most things that people today call "art" is not. Splatters on a canvas inspire no one, for example. Just expressing yourself is not art; even a fart is a form of expression.
Is code art? It can be. Have you ever seen a few lines of code that just made you go "Wow! I wish I could think up stuff like that!" If that experience actually made a difference, if it helped you closer to actually BE able to think up "stuff like that", then that code was art.
Bjarke Roune
Art is that which inspire. It shows the mark of genius. It is deep. Clearly, code can be art.
Bjarke Roune
My opinion on the art vs craft thing is that craft is the mechanical process of creation - what you can teach to someone else. Art comes from within. Thus, you can learn all about perspective, use of color, how to combine pigments, etc. and become a competent painter of pictures, but all you have mastered is the craft of painting. You are not truly an artist until your inspiration is projected onto the canvas.
Similarly, you can master the craft of programming, but if all you're producing is code to fit someone else's specifications, there is little art. If you're creating some piece of software just because you wanted to, (not because you needed a piece of software to do something) it could be art.
I have always wanted to be creative. When I was growing up I wanted to draw or paint in the worst way. Unfortunately, I couldn't draw worth a darn. In high school I majored in drafting, and did OK there.
It was in high school that I had my first experiences with a computer. I saw that computer at the end of a 300 baud modem, I learned BASIC. I found that I could create!
As my education progressed, I discovered that the most the really good coders viewed themselves as artists more than engineers.
Programming is an art form with many different mediums. I wish more people understood that.
Stand Fast,
Stand Fast,
tjg.
I'll agree that there's somethings that functionality (and usually cost) is the only thing that matters. An architect designing an office building, for instance, probably won't include any elegant or beautiful designs in his or her work, since cost and functionality would be the primary concerns. On the other hand, if that architect was designing an individual's residence, elegance in the design would probably be a primary concern.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
You can screw up making a sculpture so that it falls apart, or botch up a painting such that it's not recognizable
I think there is a lot of modern art that tries quite specifically to do these things :) It doesn't necessarily make them any less effective!
I'd say that a functional object (house, car, software) can be artful and contain elements of art, but it is not art in and of itself simply because you can always say "well, it works (or doesn't)". You just can't say that objectively about a art - which is what makes it so interesting to spend time on.
Art needs three things.
Frankly (haha), I agree with him.
I don't understand why you need to classify map makers, couldn't you say that they are in their own category? Why do you need to categorize a field, it doesn't serve a purpose.
-----Zephyre
..., but have you ever worked with artists? You're still probably doing more.
I'd say the line would be from hooking your average artist up to an electroencephilogram.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Quite different things here.
The goal of an artist is to create a work which will produce an emotional response from the viewer (auditor, etc.)
The goal of a programmer is create an algorithm which produces certain states in a computer.
Now, one may admire the cleverness of an algorithm, or the soundness of a barn, but this doesn't make either into art.
It takes just as much skill to write a program in C as it does to write a good sonnet in English. The end product might be different, but the concept is pretty much the same.
I can write a program, and prove that it is correct. Maybe I don't even have to do the proof myself; people are working on "proof generators". Programs!
I can also write a sonnet to my love. I want to tell her how euphoric I feel when I am near her, and how morose I feel when we are apart. What is the calculus which proves the sonnet describes my feelings? Is there a geometry of the heart to help me with my construction?
My definition of art is something that can convey some emotion to the viewer. Yes, you can have elegant, creative, even beautiful code, but you can't really portray anger or love or fear with a piece of code.
The map creator could be considered an artist if he attempts to make a map that conveys a message or has a certain ascetic. The mapper has to focus and use his knowledge of the tools to create his masterpiece. Or not.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Programming is a Craft: functional work where esthetics have a place.
Map and level design are Technical Arts: esthetic work constrained by the techniques. Sculpting come to mind as another example.
So there, you may now go in peace.
-
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Programming is art in the sense that the engine in a Mercedes is art. It is the fact that it runs so smoothly is quite beautiful, but the beauty is derived from the fact that it was created very well, and performs fluidly.
Programming is not art in the sense that you can print out the raw code and hang it in a frame, and have it appreciated by non-programmers (be it artists or not).
So it all derives on what you view as "art."
Well.. I know "web development" is a far cry from game development, but ive done extensive amounts of the former.
:-p
We have a graphics department. They HAVE to know the parameters they have to work with in a browser, and they have to work somewhat closely with us on exaclty what is possible with graphics in a broswer, and what works, and what does not.
Letting a creative design user interface is a double edged sword. Most of the time form over functioanlity is stressed, it looks just perfect this way. Yeah sure it looks perfect but the users cant really use it. Some of the time you get some real creative interfaces that are really great.
But our rule as software developers is to leave the interface design to us. We work more closely with people who use the software, we get the feedback we handle the coding of the UI.
We take suggestions but in the end we stress functionality in our design, not form.
I am not a incredibly creative or artisticily inclined person. I am *okay* from practice but some people are born more creative than others, that is a fact
Very good graphics people tend to be abstract thinkers in my opinon as that is what i observe with most graphics people. Programmers tend to be incredibly anylitical. I think the latter combined with the amount of work closely we do with so many interfaces to computer programs it grants a software developer a much better idea of what is good at design time as far as UI functionality goes.
The bounds of a graphic designer are limitless. Everything on the web would be neat perfectly formed videos graphics people created if it were possible. It is not. Working with web developers these boundaries have to be learned and the graphics process must be based on the boundaries of the system you are working with, there is a fine balance and some give/take has to be done. To an artist a one pixel deviation in just the right spot can be like you throwing away their entire design.. (An exaggeration but not much).
So there is a balance, I think UI is best left to programmers ultimately, with strong help and feedback from graphics people the whole way you can end up with a nice and flashy product that still remains functional. It is possible and most everyones comes out pretty happy in the end.
Jeremy
Should read:
Well... except in that way.
Don't you have it when you make a mistake on the puntchline?
If you wrote a virus that infected peoples computers. Then changed all the microsoft icons to pentagrames. Then I spose that could be considered art.
Or if you wrote a program that expressed your self in a differnt, not so harmful way. I spose that could be consided art aswell.
Why do I think this? Cause I'm a graphic designer/web designer. If I made a personal web site for my self. I would consider it a peice of art.
But if I was doing it as a job for someone. I don't consider it art. Becasue I'm not expressing my self. I doing work for someone.
I spose you could say that I was expressing on the behalf if I was doing a oil painting for an ad.
I think of what I do more as design/engineering. I trying to communicate with the person who is using my site. Not trying to express myself to them.
I think thats one of the biggest differnces between an artist and a designer. I spose what make you which, depends on what your doing it for.
If course, these things tend to overlap a bit in the real world. I think a game progaer would be a bit of both in this case. Depending on how much much creative control he had over the game.
I think that makes goups like britney spear, backstreet boys, designers. Since they have been designed for a target audience. I hardly think britney does it to express herself. Well... except in that. ;)
A good definition (I wish I could claim authorship): An art is something where the personality, creativity, etc. of the individual doing the work strongly influences the quality, usability, etc. of the end product. Otherwise, you have a craft. Painting a landscape is an art. Painting your house is a craft.
By this definition, programming, web site design, game design, etc. are clearly arts and not crafts.
What a troll!
Let me tell you something : real artists pay attention to every details. Try to find a mistake in Bach.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I would like to recommend a book that demonstrates the beauty of creativity. It's a book about a mathematician, an artist, and a musician... or, that is at least one way of looking at it. Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid weaves together the works of three creative individuals, demonstrating through example, that the things commoningly known as mathematics, art, music - they all share the same beauty. With a second glance, the book is about three mathematicians, or three artists, or three musicians, or any combination thereof!
Anyway, this book is very common. You can find it at your library, or you can buy your own copy for $18. It is worth your time, money, effort! If you are a programmer, an engineer, a mathematician... a musician, and/or an artist, this book will make great bedtime reading.
If you're doing your job right, you're spending your time buried in MSDN CD's, doing the simplest thing which could work, and installing your software on as many different hardware/OS combinations as you can find... because DirectX can act differently.
The only thing expected of you is to get things done on time and competently. Don't crash, keep the framerate up, don't do anything weird. Reaching that level of transparent simplicity is actually quite hard, most progammers can't do it. But I wouldn't call it art. And -- oh yeah -- nobody cares about how well factored or designed your code is, because the bits are going to get burned on a CD, and that's the primary focus. Will it get done on time? That's the question.
The creative people (and it's not you, you don't have time) write a script which gets approved by a publisher. That's where all the cool ideas which people appreciate come from. And the Photoshop and 3DStudio jockeys -- the artist -- they make decisions about the look, usually the script'll have a bit of discression for them.
But in terms of creative interaction? Well -- if you're supporting 8-bit graphics, you'll spend a fair amount of time convincing the artists why they should use the same palette on all their bitmaps. And that you need to change it at the last minute.
In terms of creativity -- I've had a lot more satisfaction doing business and web programming. In those realms, a good O-O design is seen as an asset and not just "geek talk".
You raise a good point. Programming (coding) is not an art any more than the skill involved in painting or sculpture is an art. The results are art. The act of a painter moving a paint-laden brush about over a canvas isn't (ordinarily) art (let's not worry about performance artist painters), but the results on the canvas afterward is. Similarly, the act of coding a program is not art, but the resulting program is. And, just as paintings vary considerably in how good they are as art, so do programs vary over a large range. Also, just as individual tastes in paintings or sculpture vary, so they will with programs.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
I remeber reading in "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" the story of a great mathematics professor who was told that one of his students had given up following mathematics to be a poet. When he heard this he replied, "Well that's good. He wasn't creative enough to be a mathematician anyways." Unfortunately, I forgot who said it.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Most art really boils down to self-expression, so if you write code to express yourself, then you are an artist.
I'm sure Van Gogh was a hit with the ladies (particularily after he cut off his ear.)
What about programs that make your line printer play Jingle Bells" or the theme from Mission Impossible?
Fight Spammers!
The art is intentionally being taken out of the process for programmers. Kind of sad, but it does seem to result in a better product.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
My anthropology professor, at least, stressed that ritual objects used by cultures all over the world, no matter how beautiful they may seem to be a Westerner, cannot be classified as art if they are perceived to carry a definite functional (i.e. religious) value.
In fact, at least according to him, many anthropologists go so far as to define art specifically as that which is _not_ functionally useful, or at least objects for which function is of secondary value.
Unfortunatly, thats not the way it is. There are many valid solutions to most problems, and the more complicated the problem the more potential solutions there are. Some answers are better in one respect, and simultaneosly worse in another.
Furthermore, when combining lots of small solutions together into a large system, there is a huge margin for subjective thought. A huge part of it is simply how one looks at the problem. This is a medium for artistic thought just as much as songwriting or mathematics.
Most businesses in the USA try to treat programming as it was menial labor. They dont understand why productivity is inversely proportional to management. They dont understand that only a handful of guys in their IT dept are doing most of the actual work.
The reason is that, like you, they dont understand that programming is in fact, an Art.
Now the real question is: are webmasters programmers (HTML?)?
What is art? One definition is that art is something made by a person who thinks he/she is an artist and put on show. In that way a programmer might be considered an artist if he would put the code on show. So maybe the only artist of coding are open source people?
...just as a painting can be art. Art is the creation of beautiful or significant things, the product of human creativity (according to Noah). I'm now in my 28th year of writing code, and I've seen much code that simply does the job. Much less that I would qualify as art, just as I wouldn't classify some of the "paint by numbers" stuff hanging in the halls at work as art. Code that is art is beautiful, elegant, understandable and creative. Sometimes that only applies to a small section of a larger program, like a real jewel in a pile of rhinestones. You can tell it's art the same way that you can tell that Beethoven is art; it evokes an emotional response. You look at it and it is beauty. Just because everyone can't see the beauty in the code doesn't make it not art. It's enough that you can see it.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
To me the difference between a programmer and a artist is how much structure or lack there of to a project. An artist starts with a blank canvas, and is only bound by imagination. A programmer on the other hand, may be intensely creative, yet is bound by the confines of the programming language.
Both are creative individuals, however, and I believe that is were the similarities lie. Artists can be creative, and programmers can be creative, but that does not mean all artists are programmers and all programmers are artists.
BigCat79
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
I don't see a so fuzzy line here, as long as you're talking about the job.
It would be harder to draw a line between the general involved skills and how would you consider a person (more of an artist or more of a programer..)
Anyway, for game creation, the jobs are pretty well clasified as you mention them yourself
Artists and Programers will "preview" the game
Programers will code the engine,
Artists will use the engine to create the game (storyline, maps, music, voices, etc.. etc..)
Sales dep will ruin their work by sarifiying plot and stability to realease it as soon as possible
Now about skills involved, it probably won't hurt any artist to have some programing skills to design some more suitable maps or whatever...
Likewise, it won't hurt the programer to be an artist, in fact, for game programing, I think most are.
Still, the line isn't fuzzy about the current job. If the main engine programer happens to also be a profesional guitarist, for that job, he was a programer.
IMO, an artist is one who creates works of wit or insight for the inspiration or enjoyment of some group of persons. This definition does not rule out the programmer as an artist, for surely code can be written that will be enjoyed by some group of people (for example: directly enjoyment of code through clever obfuscation, or the indirect enjoyment of code through a videogame). Thus programming can be considered another medium for artistic expression.
Of course, not all programers are artists, just as not everyone who uses a pencil is an artist. The key lies in the intent.
Why do you consider programming to be something other than art? Sure, a non-programmer may not be able to appreciate the code in raw form, but even a layman can appreciate an intuitive, well-written interface or an efficient-running program.
No matter what field you're in, be it Programming, Painting, Architecture or Demolitions, there is beauty and art to be found. If you ever get a chance to watch a demolitions crew topple a tall building, go see it. Watching a skyscraper coming down is a sight to behold. The fact that the moment is gone when the dust clears doesn't change the fact that it's art.
If you are one that likes to burrow into code, make sure to check out the code for Ogg Vorbis. I don't understand most of the math behind the encoding algorithm, but the structure is beautiful and easy to understand. This code was definitely written by artists. The code for the Apache Foundation's Xerxes XML is another project that I would consider to be great art.
Those who judge programming and art by seperate measures need to go back and read their Zen. It may all come down to differences in the definition of 'art', but I'll always shake my head when someone claims there's something that falls outside the scope of what can be considered art.
Seth
Artists and Programmers might as well be two completely different things. Not for any logical reason, but because the both sets of people DO NOT want to be confused with each other. I think frinsore was trying to say "Artists and Programmers have to know alot of the same stuff - can't we just smack them together and make an uber-artist-programmer and forget about the differences?" No, Frinsore, keep trying. If you've been in the game industry for more than a month, you'll know that you cannot give both the same title. You can create some very good communication between the two, with lots of things learned about each other's trade, but you can't create an artist-programmer Frankenstein and expect to get the best of both worlds without losing quite a bit from each. There are huge differences in attitude, attention span, purpose, and social circles.. Thank you.
-- This sentence is false.
For the simple fact that you can make "perfect" code.
Eventually you will reach the point of diminishing returns and coding anymore is pointless.
There is no "perfect" art.
So if programming is an art, and it obviously has its practical/utilitarian purposes--would the genre be neo art deco? ;)
Hell throw the concept of a digital divide in to the mix and the neo existentialists will really have a field day tearing it apart as a means of expression.
You obviously have issues with your own inability to get laid and feel the need to vent your frustrations on an undeserving and often socially inept class of programmers.
For the sake of humoring you, it's not so much the media that an artist chooses that enables this [in]famous ability to pull gine--it's the artist's passion that has a tendancy to bleed in to other aspects of their life and personality that really boosts their attractiveness.
I find a lot of pleasure in good code and I do believe that it's a safe assumption that I pull roughly ten or so times more puss than you. ;)
A few months ago - when I was watching 'Dead Poets Society' (I must have seen it a dozen times by now) while preparing for an exam - I thought: 'Yes, but why study poetry in school? Who really needs it?'. And then i thought: 'Computer engineers!
/Ter
'What the devil is he talking about?'
A good poet can use his or her knowledge and experience in a language to write expressions that delivers a statement - or a feeling - to the reader. This is usually done in such a way so it is easy to read and conforms to the structure of the verse.
A coder uses his or her knowledge and experience in a computer language to write classes and functions that implements some functionality. This should be done in such a way so it is easy for others to understand what the code does. It should also conform to the structure and coding conventions of the rest of the program.
In both cases we're reaching for the excellence in simplicity and structure.
Ofcause there's a lot of lyrics out there that may be an unsuitable inspiration for software development. I wonder how code based on Techno would look (perhaps I'm just getting old)...
Gottlob Frege said "Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician". Well, in that case, perhaps every good computer engineer is atleast half a poet...
The statement comes from a T-shirt I purchased from a Demo party that was held in Canada (Crash 1997).
A demo programmer is making code that is art, no ifs ands or buts. Take a look at any 4K intro from any demo party. These are artistic presentations (no audio) that are not only cool to look at but they are compact in size. Some "Hello World" programs take up more then 4096 bytes by themselves, it takes an incredible amount of talent to cram a Quake engine into 4096 bytes, but people do it. Not to accomplish a task, but to see if they can do it, perhaps to show off, either way it is artistic.
Demo programming aside look at obfuscation contests, there are competitions for code that looks neat (the perl dolphin code that now has a tshirt from thinkgeek comes to mind) to code that looks like its doing 1 thing, when it really does another.
The 256 byte game programming contest that was held on IRC a several years ago (#coders) was inspiring. Several dozen people (including myself) created playable games in less space then what this paragraph takes up. That is incredible, and the code is inspiring.
I like looking at regular art, paintings, buildings, nature, and whatnot. But, no regular art has made me quiver with enlightenment like when I figure out and understand a complex piece of code, or a major optimization, or a new algorithm that shaves 220 cycles off the inner loop.
Haven't you ever looked at someone else's code and thought "eww gross. He/She should have done this like that".
Code is Art.
ideal; model tiny; codeseg; org 100h; start: cli; hlt; ret; ENDS; END start
Is code art? I think that I have appreciated seeing how other people approach programming and their use of logic. However, looking at code is not likely to prompt consideration of ideas beyond the task at hand, let alone any emotional response. To me, real art brings me away from the present, to experience emotions and ideas beyond my current train of consciousness. Art is transcendental.
thinking about whether code is art or not. You could be doing so many more useful things with your time. For example, you could be writing some code. Or painting a picture. Or doing your tax return.
Is your life that easy/boring that you have no other problems or issues to concern yourself with?
Don't post on slashdot. Get back to work.
I can mostly agree that well-written code is art, in the sense that good archetecture is art...
But I have never seen anybody's code that rivaled the elegance of Beethoven.
Charles Ives, maybe.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Some would say that Perl does not require much attention to detail either, and that mistakes can be incorporated into the work. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I think that programming can be Art and is depending on how it is done. Someone that creates a piece of code to work towards not only a working program but an elegant design and easily readable code is an artist. while there are others that don't care they go to work pump out some reasonable code that works and care not about the elegance readabilty or simplicity. these are just mere coders. An analogy might be that anyone can take a roller and paint the walls of a house but it takes an artistic talent to make painting of a house.
Most programmers are not artists. Many of them are trained monkeys, others just care about a high salary, some are skilled engineers or technicians.
Engineers can solve problems in elegant ways. The Chrysler Building in NYC is an office building, but the style in which it is crafted makes it more than an anonymous suburban office building.
Ever enter a large cathedral? The sheer size and bulk is designed to overwhelm the senses and awe an individual. You feel very small in a cathedral. Some feel the presence of god. Others see the balance of spires and stained glass and see beauty.
Visit an airshow someday and look at an F-15 or P-51 mustang on display. A fighter plane is a perfectly balanced piece of machinery. It sits on the runway, poised for takeoff like a bird of prey. It radiates power and the means to destroy men and property, but is a beautiful machine as well.
I think all of these examples are art in one form or another.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd like to say first that I'm a blurred line: I designed the user interface for QNX's Realtime Platform as well as consumer appliance devices and demo graphics for a wide range of hardware/software systems. *But* I have a degree in computer science, spend a considerable amount of time coding and using software design/engineering skills on a daily basis.
The side effect is that I'm sitting on a fence - somtimes losing coding abilities by drawing and designing or losing my art abilities if I'm not drawing thousands (literally) of tiny icons all day long.
But it is undeniable that I produce art. In order to get my designs from conception to implementation it requires a great deal of engineering. Of course, I also see art in the patterns of engineering: the movement and abstraction of information married to the form or representation of information and the availability of a context's action.
There is a blurred line - and it is a very valuable skill. As a senior interface designer, I would hirer one interface designer to fifty web designers. Interaction designer, high quality computer art ability and engineering skill is a *highly* sought after trait.
In fact - if you have these skills and you want to be designing something more substantial than a computer game, email me: bbull@qnx.com. I will gladly interview you and challenge you with serious design artwork and engineering challenges.
William Bull
bbull@qnx.com
Senior UI Engineer
QNX Software Systems, Ltd.
The line is in your mind. Those who value art over science would be more apt to consider themselves artists, and vice-versa. Does it change the code? No. The underlying theory? No. All it changes is your approach to programming, and the self-esteem you derive from it. Call it what you will.
So that we can get paid more. :)
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Creativity is the word. Everybody can become a creative person. No matter whether a programmer or a philosopher or a worker. Everything can have its aestetics. The question is: "Who is able to recognize beautiness of creative process (=art) in this or that?" If all people can recognize it in mathematics, it could be called art. (And it is for sure). On the other hand I am not able to eat big part of what is called "art for masses".
Trying to make chaos pieces meaningful. The more meaningfullness I get, the more new chaos appears.
Blacksmiths, Cobblers, Architects, Database Engineers, Layout Designers, Stone Masons, Landscapers, and C programmers are all Artisans. All of the have Kung Fu (Skill through effort) that is used to create things.
While some think that only PURE art (Art created for expressive purposes only) is the only TRUE form of art, I think such people are nincompoops and I am entitled to my opinion. I am an engineer. I am an artisan. I create things that serve a purpose but they have beauty in their structure.
Now I may have no formal training in the classical "arts", but it has always been my understanding that true art is a reflection of the world in which we live. As such, the argument can easily be made that programming is the most relevant art form currently being practiced.
Painting and sculpture, especially all this "avant garde" stuff that consists of nothing more than a few splashes of paint on a canvas, don't have anything to do with the world people live in at all. These elitist dandies like to proclaim that they are doing something of great public good, but who sees this "art"? Who is affected by it?
Contrast this with your average programmer. My art work, while rarely seen directly, effects the lives of thousands of people a day. My Perl scripts for a large eCommerce site have a positive benefit to many people. And if you've ever read my code you know that it takes an artistic talent to make sense out of such apparent chaos ;-)
Yes, modern day programmers are artists of the highest caliber. Our presence in this world is acutely felt by many, and our absence would be seriously detrimental to society. If you can not see the inherent beauty in a well-written algorithm then I am afraid you have no soul.
* Every programmer I know makes a fat salary.
* Every artist I know can barely afford ~$200 a month rent and eats a lot of rice.
* Programmers are engineers who solve problems using code.
* Art must have different meaning to different people, otherwise it is propaganda.
* A piece of software only does one thing.
This discussion would only arise among this community. I'm so far removed from how artists think, live and behave, and it sounds like so are the rest of you who like to pontificate about the artist/programmer duality.
What a great example of young minds struggling to fit a marketable identity.
Quit posing. Quit fantasizing about how many demographics you can span.
Quit sighting cliche examples of supposed high-brow enlightenment: an elegant mathematical proof, a Beethoven symphony, fucking swan lake, or gotterdamurung. Gag.
Just do what you enjoy and stop listening to soft-drink commercials.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Art of any kind is a learned skill. A few people in the world have a very natural inclation towards it, but most of the time, whether it's programming or painting, anyone can learn to do it. Some people have a 'knack' for the abstract, and some have an innate grasp of logic and numbers. People who claim they are un-artistic are usually underestimating the human capacity to create and have never been encouraged to do so themselves.
If you define an art as a skilled trade - then yes, programmers are always artists, especially programmers who can finish an entire piece of code that is both useful and elegant.
In my profession as a 3D animator, it is required that the artisan have a very rare combination of skills, both technical computer literacy and a very thorough understanding of perception, color, light, composition and aesthetics - the kind of thing that you learn as a student of the fine arts.
3D Animators and 2D compositors vary widely between those that have more technical than aesthetic skills, and some who have an amazing quantity of both. Some of the most useful and valuable animators and programmers are shader writers. This is the point at which nature and math come crashing together, for nature is really a series of deeply interwoven, extremely complex and infinitely repeatable mathematical patterns. Some examples of shader writers are people who author fur shaders, complex particle systems, nature shaders such as fractal plant, tree and undergrowth geometry generators, liquid particle systems and volumetric alg implementations for clouds, smoke, water and fire.
These programmer/animators not only understand the math behind these phenomena, they can also tweak the effect to look correct to the eye and make it applicable to use on screen. The raw math behind natural phenomena doesn't always give you the indended result, so you still need to know what it's supposed to 'look' like to the human eye, and why.
I myself am not a programmer, I use other people's programs and shaders to create things, but my 'art' would not be possible without their end of the equation.
---Mike
Mike Massee
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.
- Frederick Brooks
This is not a silly question, but the answer is more obvious if looked at first from the "art" side. Before you can classify art, you have to define it. What is art? This question has been asked innumerable times using different "artforms". Abstract art is a good example. Abstract art is now accepted as normal, but it once was someone's drop cloth. "Art" cannot be defined or bounded. Art is sometimes a personal thing, but does not have to be. The point is: art is anything that anyone wants it to be. Including Picasso, Beethoven, and code.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
That being said, there is certainly art involved in designing a user interface, or even an API to provide the most aethetic and "natural" way for people and programmers to interface with your game/code. This is the subjective art involved in coding.
The problem that I have found with alot of people that code is that they don't have the rigor to back up their art. They do things too much by 'feel' when they could be getting better performance if they were more rigorous in writing algorithms. I guess that's a cost/benefit analysis between writing code fast, and writing fsat code. I've always leaned towards the latter when I've had a choice.
BTW: The dangers of lack of rigor are demonstrated in some of the post-modern literary theories, such as deconstructionism, fathered by Jacques Derrida. (IMHO)
If programming is art, is perl code abstract art? That would explain why I don't understand it when I look at it.
.....that some things in this world are a science and others are an art, but programming is neither - it's a craft.
Hum, I think you've been taken in by the "myth of the artist" a little - the idea of the starving painter in his garret, the senitive poet, the tortured soul.
Art is as much a part of the social and economic matrix as anything else. It is a product both for and of the society around it. It's also big business - certainly in Europe - you only have to look at the the amount of hype and money surrounding such people as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the like. (Although I did love it when Emin appeared on a late night discussion programme horribly drunk!)
The attempt to separate art into a "nether-space" of pure thought or emotion is always doomed to backfire. Look at the way Abstract Expressionism (and its adulation by Greenberg) was usurped by politics, and made into a symbol of "Western Freedom", as opposed to the Social Realism of the USSR, and indeed of thirties US public art. (Much of which is rather good - check out Louis Lozowick, Orozco, Rivera and others).
Going back further, you only have to look to the renaissance - patrons would struggle to comission frescoes and paintings for their chapels and churches. You can see their figures in the works - they've paid for eternal prayer for their souls in mass. And salvation has got to be an enticing product at that time!
Are games much different to that? Just because something is commercial, doesn't deny it art status. Ideas and expressions are currency too...
-- Sig Sig Sputnik
I worked for a guy who swore that programming had nothing to do with art. He knew this because he was a programmer and an artist. At the time I disagreed with him but since he was my boss and it was just a passing discussion anyway, I ignored it. I shouldn't have. It turns out that his art was producing horrible electronic music that no one with ears or a brain would listen to and that his idea of good software was worse than his idea of good art.
Good programming is more of a craft than a science. A good craftsman can be an artist. This is the same in programming. Compromise the artistic aspect to produce useful, working code but don't sacrifice artful code because it isn't valuable. Beautiful code is valuable.
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
A game artist is anyone to whom you it must be explained that 126 is not a power of 2.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
The dictionary defines a Craft as
An occupation or trade requiring manual dexterity or skilled artistry.
To really appreaciate one persons craft requires another craftsman. But every one can appreaciate the end product of the craf (if done well:-).
this is a sig.fault
The creativity that one goes through to produce art or software is one of the same. Artists go through many inspirational moments, as well as tedious ones. So do software engineers. With people like rasterman around, do you really think there is a line at all?
-ds
Your comparison is simply irrelevant to the discussion. Getting laid (or lack thereof) is simply a bi-product who you are, not whether or not your an artist. But, if you'd like to go down this road, I know plenty of so-called geeks that get laid, probably more so than Artists, simply because we can afford to buy, oh, say one of these. I'm sure there are beautiful artists in the world, both outside as well as in, but you infer that because artists are, programmers are not. This is simply not so.
I see through your lack of insight. And beauty? All I see here is Ego.
-ds
I'm a professional programmer and to a minor extent a professional artist (painter). Having studied famous painters, especially on the subject of color and composition I have no doubt that the good artists are the ones that were/are EXTREMELY analytical, and that is what usually set them apart from the soon forgotten artists. You can argue they they were color/composition programmers (at least the painters). They follow complex rules, they look at designs from a high up architecural point of view all the way down to the level of the pigments and mediums and substrate. All the good artists, from davinci to picasso may have been emotional and passionate and even crazy, but they always developed their artwork in a very objective, deliberate, and analytical way.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
On the issue of level design, anyone with the right mindset can do it providing they can master the tools needed. It is not uncommon to have a non-technical and non-artist do level design. I once had my kid brother do some work on one. We had non-critical object placement done by our secretary for another title. The important part is being able to create a realistic environment that is pleasing and that works. Once I had an artist develop 3-D models for a driving game, and she drew all the lines on the road about 3 feet long as they appear to a driver. If you get out and measure them they are actually 20+ feet long. This just proves the point you need the right mindset to create good levels, and artistic talent does not necessarily qualify you.
I would recommend getting a group together with everyone involved. The programmers to give technical advice, artists are typically very creative and they are great for sketches, and gamers (hopefully your artists and programmers are also hardcore gamers). Always remember who you are creating this game for, and don't forget, if you don't love it, they probably won't either.
this is a nice argument, but it rests on our acceptance of your definition of art:
Art is about conveying beauty and/or a message to an audience (sometimes just the artist himself).
right. well, i think art is mashed potatoes, motherfucker.
art and programming don't have to be mutually exclusive, because the former is undefinable. Not to mention that you use the subjective terms "beauty" and "message" to define it. (what the hell is beautiful?) Basically, you've stated : Art is about conveying [indeterminable things] and/or [inspecific communications] to an audience (sometimes just the artist myself). This does not strike me as enough evidence to definitively exclude programming as art. (although the front page blurb seems to equate an "elegant solution/production/code/etc." with "art" -- something i'm not prepared to do either.)
saying programming is NOT art is just as ridiculous as saying programming IS art. it can't be proved or disproved in a general case (or probably even a specific one), and we can argue about it for fucking forever. better to spend that time making something that makes you happy. (whether you choose to call it programming, or art, or whatever).
fsfhihsihcuerk.
(beyond that, if you're an artist, you probably think so already, and don't need a goddamn slashdot thread to convince you.)
So is the Mona Lisa art or not? If you can't define it, it becomes really difficult to talk about!
determining whether the mona lisa is "art" does not stop me from talking about its composition, author's process, or place in history.
fisfhcuerk.
er. so clearly, you've never talked to anyone about the mona lisa, computer-boy.
Oh, please. Walking and talking are learned skills, but hailing a cab to ease your aching feet is hardly an artistic statement of the state of your soul.
Animals in general are multi-skilled creatures, humans particularly so, the ability to be both artist and programmer does not make them the same thing. A program may be creative, non-intuitive, elegant and unique, but that still don't make it art. It may just be a superbly crafted tool in response to a need. The fact that someone or something is praiseworthy does not mean that the praise should include claims that it is art (with the exception of the not-always-literally-intended, "That, my friend, is a work of art."). "Art" is considered a desirable thing, and the word is used as a result as a form of superlative. But that doesn't hold up in discussion.
Of course, if someone has some artistic idea (I'm going to cowardly chicken out and not attempt to define that) and programming happens to be the tool by which it is expressed, then great. It forms part of the craftsmanship that is involved in creating art. If the program is well written, the artwork is well executed. If the program embodies the entire work, then it is the artistic medium. And the programmer and the artist may be one and the same.
Don't be misled by the flexibility of the English language, there may be an art to good programming, but programming ain't art.
You have a fixed set of tools and must create something from those limitations.
There's two ways to respond to this: one, pretty much every human activity has a fixed set of tools with which to perform any given act, or two, there is no human activity with fundamentally fixed tools, as you're free to create any new tools you can think of to help you out. Either way, this doesn't exclude anything from being defined as art, so it's an empty argument. You've got to provide some differentiation, unless you want to argue that art, engineering and the natural evolution of my girlfriend are all one and the same thing (note: if confronted by girlfriend I would hypocritically change my argument, rather than try and explain why she isn't a work of art)
The other classic logical error above is the implied, "Lindsey is a programmer, and Lindsey is an artist. Therefore programming is art."
Art is about things like intention and effect, not the tools or the media employed. You can't justify a work of art by its rarity or difficulty, or even its beauty. I might state that a creative, elegant circuit design is a work of art, but I wouldn't mean it literally. Likewise my girlfriend. But conversely, due to appreciation of the elegance involved, I might say that both are literally beautiful to me, for beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (Again, if confronted by girlfriend, I will quickly turn hyprocrite, rather than try and explain why she has just been compared to a PCB).
why are the artists better dressers?
Programming is to art as VB is to assembler.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
First off your comparision of Good Code and Good art is only flawed by the simple fact of mass appeal. Yes good code could be just as awe inspiring as art but what makes tru art good is mass appeal. Maybe someday when your dead and gone all our childrens children will look up at your code in that way as we look at classic art, but not now. There are people that bridge that gap. I do it all the time. I got my BS in architectural design and worked in the field for 4 years till I found my true calling in the IT industry. I spent most my life drawing, writing code, playing video games, and making computers and electronics work. I'm realy a freak amoung freaks. I also find myself doing what I call translation work. i.e. Ok guys, the customer needs this this and this...translation. We need an SQL DB and develope our own application...yah yah yah. or In order to do that you will need a VPN. To explain..A VPN is like having a network like the one in the this office but.... I'm not a realy nerd, real nerds are much smarter then me and I realy respect them for it. Theres already new people and ideas knocken on the IT industries doors and the IT industry is going to need to open alot of them in the next few years. I just plan on stiken my foot in em.
-- Disclaimer: I can't really back up anything I post on
Art is a emotional expedience. Functional objects can be art. Take a walking stick for example. Even the most practical of craftsmen has choices to make. From the shape and type of the material used to the paint/polish/finish of the final product. It has a definite feel to it. Comparing the merits of walking sticks is a personal expedience. It's the possible choices that make it art. If you give a rigid set of design specifications to a hundred programmers you will get a hundred different programs. Each will hake it's own experience. I doubt there is anyone that can say after they have purchased a program from a store that after they have used it for a while they don't form personal opinions about how they like or dislike it no matter if it delivers everything promised on the box. I notice that some people are limiting the artistic content to the expressiveness to the form of the source code and not considering the object of that code, the program itself. The Mandelbrot Set is beautiful but not artistic while the program that creates it is, no matter if it uses an ugly commend line interface. But then again other people may actually like it. That's what makes it art!
In Plato's Academy which became the model for later Greek and Roman educational institutions, there was a core set of courses called the Trivium. The Trivium consisted of three subjects: Math, Music and Rhetoric. These were the only subjects considered worthy of imperial citizens. The other arts were decidedly for slaves including both the painting and sculpture for which these ancient cultures are so famous.
Originally then --if we take these ancient academic values to be the origins of those common in modern american culture-- painting and sculpture were not condsidered arts at all. On the other hand, debate was considered the highest form of art.
I think that there is a very profound sense in which this ancient notion of art continues to prevail in postmodern American culture despite the fact that we now accept various other forms of craftswork as art besides just music. Why is Picasso considered art? It is precisely because Picasso's work was so revolutionary, controversial and often disconcerting to his peers that he is considered a great artist rather than some magic power of his amazing brush strokes. It is not the artists paintings themselves which are instilled with the essence of art whatever the hell that is, rather it is the role of the work in society. It is the rhetorical function of the work which makes it art. All great art must play a rhetorical role in postmodern America just as it had to in ancient Greece. This is simply the Western tradition being kept alive.
Now, are video games art in the postmodern American sense? Damn right they are! In fact, video games are clearly one of the only valid artforms in existence today. What do I mean by valid? Video games are perhaps the one genre that most often clashes with accepted social conventions. That is to say, video games engage us in debate and this is the height of art in the western sense.
The will to art is apparent in the work of ID software more than any other source I can think of. Of course Wolf3D was controversial at a time when skinhead gangs were making the papers at regular intervals. Here was a game stretching consumer technology to the limit, more immersive than any other and freely distributed --by default if not by intention-- featuring rooms mapped with Nazi memorabilia, swastikas, and torture scenes. A stunning piece! Who could help but be shocked by this bizarre and striking combination? Wolf 3D was art and ID knew it.
Why do I say that ID knew it? Easy, remember the maps for the original Quake? Although the swastikas were gone from the walls in Quake, the level maps still had them. At least one of the room layouts retained a swastika pattern. I feel that ID realized they were making art and they realized that all real art is polemic. Hence, they needed some magic lucky charms to keep their edge.
Since that time, the technology has developed sufficiently to allow ID and other developers to tap into other emotive rhetorical symbols such as fire and all whole pallete of OpenGL effects.
My point should be obvious by now, but I'll sum up just to keep things tidy. In western civilization high art has always been a subject of debate. The preceding statement is a definition, not an observation. Under this definition, certain craftsmen within the video game genre clearly stand out as true artists. Their merits are not based on the beauty of their work, but on the beauty of their work's affect on society.
Well... and I must disagree with you.
Tetris isn't art? Then what about 8-bit-times games? Do you mean todays crap-games are more "art" than old, becouse they have more graphics and soundtracks?
If we talk about programmer - we can't think about graphics, 3d-meshes, soundtracks. We should think about methods to display this graphics, 3d-algorithms, etc... Tetris was a big thing years ago, and I think "shareware programmers" are (or were) bigger artists than commercial programmers, just like GNU developers...
the definition of the border between the two is so blurry as to be different for each person. It's what you make of it, not what one person or group of people say.
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MOVE 'SIG'.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
doesn't mean it isn't art. I think computer hardware and software can be as expressive a medium as oil paint, sculpture or poetry but I think a lot of people regard it as purely functional because it is so useful.
Imagine two news stories: both communicate the same information about an event, but one is well written and one isn't. Functionally, they're equivalent, but one is more artistic (by my definition of artistic, anyway). Both are examples of the same medium, but I don't know of any newspaper reporters who are as well respected as poets.
From my own experience the parts of computer programming that are most artistic are those without an obvious purpose - INTERCAL and wmDiscoTux (XMMS plugin) spring to mind. Artistic programmers stop being artistic when their employers tell them just to produce functionally correct code; then they're programming to get a paycheck, not for the sake of programming.
Another problem is visibility, of course - if no-one's going to inspect your source code to notice that you shaved 4ms off a loop using some of the most elegant, cunning self-modifying code, then the motivation for doing it falls away.
BTW I don't mean to imply that other forms of art aren't useful, just (IMHO) less so.
If a program makes you laugh, makes you cry, brings you to emotional extremes, or makes you think that the world is either the most hilariously absurd of places, or the dreariest of all possible experiences, then what you DON'T have is a work of art.
What you DO have is a Microsoft product.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Yes, I have shown some girls what I have done, and even though they may not understand it at the lower level, they are impressed, and I dare say aroused!
Btw, most of these ladies are also athletes. I don't think I've ever met a fat slob that I could honestly say I found above average intelligence.
Whereas the graphics people might be more artistic, or better artists, they are forced to work within tight constraints and act more as designers. They are just doing a job and have to set aside artistic ambitions.
Programmers do their art of problem solving. The constraints are welcomed because without them they would not know where to begin. Programmers do not code for code's sake, but for a practical purpose.
That is the line between artists and programmers. Artists will create art for the love of it. Programmers, however creative, will not code without a practical underlying purpose.
Disclaimer: I am a programmer, graphic designer, musician, composer, martial arts practitioner, and artist.
-- Boycott Shell
I used to get my kicks painting (see http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Study/1179/ ) but now I get 'em cutting COBOL (keep your sniggers to yourself). The main difference for me is code lacks a spiritual element. Even graphics software tools lack the "bite" and immediacy of physical media. I know some have sucessfully emulated it ( i.e. Fractal Paint), but it is just emulation, and leaves very little room for intuition. I suspect we will need to move beyond 2d display before this situation improves.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Not that I do not believe in Knuth's Art of Programming but nowadays, it is pretty hard to find some software requirements which do not already exist. Entreprise programming notably is most of the times a question of assembling existing components and configuring them. Design patterns are completely common too and they cover the major part of the needs. There is no longer such a thing as creative art in programming for 99% of programmers. There are code writing conventions, documentation conventions, testing conventions. The 1% is left to people writing prototypes for the newest technologies. However, there is certainly a refactoring art for seasoned developers reviewing young programmers' code. :)) The art of performance tuning perhaps. And maybe, the art of applying the correct solutions to known problems.
In such a context, how can one claim to be an artist ? By reinventing the wheel without knowing others are building cars already...
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
All of these ideas depend on variables such as: Your "point of veiw"... so on an so forth... Most people feel that most bank database programmers ARE NOT artists in what they do... (the job title would imply so... duh...) But then again, these peolpe tend to be self-involved dicks, who would be offended if you did not suggest that they *are*, in such a debate... Please... If you are an Artist, who is good, and aim to produce Art (what is art is an entirely different subject...) and DO produce Art, then all the more you are an Artist. Web deesign is alot like psychology... science peolpe find it hard to accept as a true science, because of it's nature, and the same can be said with web design. You are going to bump gulies with code one day... if you want to produce good web design, that is.. stay ahead of the trend of designers and attract attention. So there is a blurred line, or can be.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
People can appreciate code for its elegance, efficiency, and brilliance: attributes which are considered "beauty" to a particular group of people.
People can appreciate art for its sound, texture, and underlying social or person message: attributes which are considered "beauty" to another particular group of people.
If people do things which require both ("traditional") artistic and technical skill, then they should consider themselves whatever they want. Different fields require different skills. Computer animators, modelers, and gaffers must be artists first and then learn the technical crap. Not everyone can do this. I think the same would be true for people who must tackle the technical end first, and then the artistic.
I think a more important consideration in looking at both art and code is "does it convey emotion?". Does it convey that there was emotion in the production process? Does it convey that there is emotion in the viewing/listening/feeling/code execution process? This is a question which I think has already been established for "traditional" art, but not for code.
Can you pour your heart and soul into an a piece or installation? Damn straight you can. Can you pour your heart and soul into an algorithm or function? Damn straight you can.
Perhaps the one distinguishing factor is that "traditional " art is typically born because of emotion/feelings and as a "natural" expression of them.
So here's the more important question: can code be written because of emotions/feelings as an expression of them? Can code invoke feelings of agreement and unification ("By looking at this, I can completely relate to the artist's feelings when s/he made this piece.")? Can it spur imagination ("this piece makes me think of...")?
What do you think? Discuss...
Like:
Where's the line between fish and fowl? (penguins)
Where's the line between hacker and cracker?
Where's the line between mother and non-? (host/surrogate/adopted mother)
You are confusing at least three different concepts. The first is "these two categories are so conceptually close that drawing a line between them is difficult" (hacker vs cracker). The second concept is "ill-defined categories" (fish, mother). The third "very different categories that contain many of the same members"--which concept applies to programmers and artists, I would argue.
Art is about conveying beauty and/or a message to an audience (sometimes just the artist himself).
Programming (and other mathematical/engineering disciplines) is about building useful structures. The humans doing the building may be partially guided by artistic concerns, but that doesn't make the output "art". The primary purpose is "does it work" not "is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."
Just because the categories of "artist" and "programmers" contain many of the same members, doesn't automatically make the output of the Programmer class art any more than it makes the output of the Artist class software.
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Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Even more so than art, you need to have some education relative to the field, and medium, to appreciate an author's work. Even among programmers this is necessary: imagine trying to get a BASIC programmer to appreciate a slick Perl snippet at a single glance.
not that anyone will read this 10 days later, but i shoulda said 'some art'.
I am an artist. I paint. I draw. I make a lot of "stuff" in general. I am also a programmer. Making a painting and making a program share more similarities than some may think. There is an algorithm. There is a starting point. When making a painting, the details don't get done first. The background, the rough outlines, the sketching and the study need to be done before the eyelashes of the subject. This is similar to the way software is written. The core of the code is usually done first. The backbones of the objects are written before they are enhanced or used in most cases. However, in my opinion, visual art and programming differ because I do them for different reasons. I may paint something to express an emotion. I code something for a more practical purpose...to get a job done or to make a customer's life easier. However, practicality and beauty cross paths quite often in real life, as well as in code. Would you rather have a plain white pitcher or one painted with stripes or floral patterns? Would you rather sleep on unbleached cotton sheets or your favorite plaid ones? Would you rather write and use code that simply gets the job done, or design an elegant system that performs efficiently, accurately, and is enjoyable to use?
I think the slashdot shirt says it all. Code Poet. Code is as much an art as poetry. Granted, alot of programmers think they can replicate Michelangelo with crayons on paper bag, hence the development of crap code. However, a great piece of coding is akin to a living organism or, in this case, a piece of art.
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You can't fight in here! This is the war room!
It is something I feel very strongly about, and I feel that those that call code an "art" are just too "up themselves" if you'll excuse the phase. Yes we might see it as "beautiful", in the same way as we might see some of the intricacies of maths as beautiful.
But under no circumstances can we call it to be on the same level as true arts like music. Yes, it does its job, it is beautiful, obviously we love it, we wouldn't do it otherwise, but it is no more art than the balance between inflation and interest rate! Code is not art, it is not a way of expressing yourself in the same way as Rachmaninov composing his piano concertos is. If you don't know it, go and download the slow movement of his second piano concerto, and this is art. No code in the world can compare.
We use the term "art" in the wrong sense completely. Yes, it is obviously open to interpretation, but I do truly believe you use it in the wrong sense. I am proud when I produce good code, I most probably would refer to it as a work of art, but I use it in the wrong sense of the word. Be proud of your work, yes, and admire others too, but don't be so short sighted as to call it "art". Admire it, find it beautiful, find it intriguing, perfect, serenely clear, whatever you like, but it is not art.
But my main point is, I totally do not buy the concept that code can be art if it is exceptionally elegant. I often hear my fellow coders (and buddies in other engineering disciplines) talk about how they think that what they do is art in some sense.
Perhaps this is my own personal definition of art...everybody seems to have one. Calling code art is sort of like calling a particularly elegant mathematical proof art, or calling a particularly well-constructed brick wall art. At least to me, art is a lot more than simply implementing something really well. I can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a particularly elegant design or implementation of something, but I consider art to be a whole lot more than mere cleverness or aesthetics. To me art has to affect me emotionally, it's a lot more than just arranging objects in an attractive or particularly useful way (which is how I see coding).
I guess mere cleverness and elegance is enough to meet just about anyone's definition of art. It just really bugs me whenever my coder/engineer buddies go on about it. Most of those sorts of people that I know are incredibly ignorant of what most people consider 'true' forms of art (films, literature, music, etc.); they tend to be very knowledgeable of their own very specialized field and not much else. So it bugs me when they try to boost their egos by elevating themselves to the level of artists, when they have no appreciation for creativity in general (not to mention, many of these same people view people who make a living with their art (musicians, writers, etc.) in contempt, like they are above them somehow).
Maybe I'm making incorrect assumptions about coders and engineers in general based on the people I've known personally, I dunno. I'm a coder myself. But from reading Slashdot, K5, newsgroups, etc. there seems to be a common mentality in the online tech community that these people like to think they are everything to everyone, and that they can do anything anyone else does better. Claiming to be artists too both denigrates what I consider to be 'real' art and gives them a totally undeserved ego boost.
None of this of course (except for the first paragraph) has anything to do with the original poster's question, I'm just ranting. :)
I totally agree with you. I started to think about architecture but that's one where there's a very fuzzy line between art and simple elegance. When I think of cathedrals (or Frank Lloyd Wright, for that matter) I would definitely consider the architects to be artists in a sense, but that would seem to go against my earlier statements. It's tough to say. I guess everyone has their own ideas about what constitutes art.
I consider myself a software artist. A piece of well-written code formatted appropriately expressed such that any coder could pick it up with little to no explanation and run with it means that it is good art. When it is sphagetthi code it is still art but just not very good. I consider programs the equivalent of a book. You can write a good book or a bad book. When someone attempts to write Shakespeare in code, the code integrates complexities together in such a way that a review of it by knowledgable coders would be awe-struck. This is much in the same way that books will awe-struck their readers. With respect to game artists, there is the possibility of creating art at several levels. You can create art at the code level and you can create art at the visual level and you can create art at the animation level. Each level can be itself be beautiful or ugly. The more beautiful any one level the more likely the other levels are beautiful but this does not have to be the case. Game artists dont have to write a single line of code if the tools that are provided by the software artist are sufficient for the game artist to create the visual or animated art.
The statement below is FALSE
The statement above is TRUE
I code. And I've published a book of poetry. And no, I don't agree that a complex piece of code is more beautiful than any poem or sonnet. It might be equal in beauty, but even that I have a hard time saying. For two reasons.
First, the code that I find most beautiful is not "beautiful because it's complex" -- that sounds like some snobbish "I can figure it out, I'm part of the 3133t" kind of thing. The most beautiful piece of code I ever read was posted on slashdot about a year ago. It was about 20 lines long, posted by a programmer who had been coding for over a decade, and the code, even though it was from the 80s and was written in a badly outdated language, almost read like perfect English. I mean, the care he put into naming his variables sensibly, so that "if" statements made intuitive sense, man that was impressive. And the way it illuminated how that part of the game worked -- I mean, that code would have been easy to maintain. I think the most beautiful code is not the complex crap that so many amateurs barf out, it is the thoughtful, streamlined code that I find to be most like poetry.
Second, poetry has often had a whole string of criteria for a "good" poem -- these are the kinds of things your teachers and professors likely grade on. These are technical things, like meter and rhyme. But there are other criteria that code will have a hard time matching. For example, poetry is often defined as "impactful" and "relevant" -- or at least, good poetry often has those qualities. Think about poetry's roots. This is how much of our history was passed down. There was a point where a "bard" was not only a poet, but a historian too. And here, I think, code will always pale in comparison to poetry. It has no hope of having the relevance of a good poem -- code cannot be understood by 95% of the population, so its relevance factor gets hammered right there. Code can indeed have a great impact on people, though. I give you that. But that is almost always due not to the source code being read, but the code being compiled and used. It's the application that has the impact.
And I think this is part of the problem you're having with your teacher. She is going to be able to get up in front of that class and recite a poem that makes the class laugh, or makes the class cry, or sways them somehow. That's relevance. And you and I cannot match that with programming code unless we pick our audiences extremely carefully.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The jist of it is, programming isn't as much art because the end goals are defined and refined continually throughout. The artsy stuff is artsy because the end result is not predetermined. Sure it's gonna be a tree, but it could be cartoony or real. And it's not gonna be pretty to everyone. Of course I've seen some butt ugly code, but that's not the end product. What the code produces is the end product.
I'm going to start a collection of great pieces of code and display them downtown at my new Code Gallery. I'll have a few pieces of Kernigan and Ritchie, a Linus or two. Maybe some local coder's pieces, and some of my own.
But then, I'm sure I'd run out of open source stuff that I can display without selling licenses for each piece.
- Sig this!
There is a fundamental link between the logic of math and the beauty of art. Take for instance music, which uses math integrally for beats, and notes. The truth is most artists are just using a part of the brain that isn't prodded as much as other pieces in school.
I'm a programmer. I consider my work to be art. Over time, my skills improve..my solutions more creative, more elegant. Am I emotionally moved by my code? Depends on what I'm doing. If its a difficult problem, or one that really matters..yes.
I'm a bachelor of arts in computer science as opposed to a bachelor of science. Personally, I cant stand sitting around taking math and physics classes. I'd much rather go out and take things that I truly enjoy..a class on music, writing or painting. I suppose this is the more typical art side of myself.
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I think these are two different types of things. Art is creative visions represented physically (or something like that) where as art for computer games are just pictures.
Programming can be creative, and graphics for games requires artistic talent, but I would not call game graphics art, as it is not really an expression of anything.
For me, a piece of code, or an elegant mathematical proof is as much art as a Picasso, or Beethoven's 5th Symphony
I really disagree with this statement. Composing music is the ultimate way to express yourself. I would hate to think there is any way to express yourself in a mathematical proof...
There are only two things in this world that smell like fish. And one of them's fish...
A map creator is neither an artist nor programmer.
To be a programmer, you have to program.
If an architect falls into the category of "artist" to you, since it is entirely opinionated, then they are an artist.
You could, I guess, construe them as designers, if they designed the map they create.
"I speak braille. Touch me."
- Hizagashira
Also, on the subject of interface creation...
The person who comes up with it "designed" it.
The person who does the art for it, if it has art, is the "artist".
The person who programmed it is the "programmer".
If the same person does more than one of these, he (or she) falls into multiple categories.
- Hizagashira
With the appropiate tools and technique, anyone can hack at a lump of stone or splatter paint over a canvas, or write code.
If you have some grip on the outcome, you can make a reasonable hack at making the outcome look like what you wanted it to be.
Lots of creative programmers working in game shops are probably no different to the artists that Disney employ in their animation studios, in that they try to reproduce an overall vision.
Knowing what the software can yield is important to an artist. Knowing what the players will tolerate is important to the success. KQ1, for example, appealed to the computer generation of its time, low graphics and nerdy puzzles. By the time of KQ6, it was good graphics and simpler puzzles, but art, none the less.
Art has something more to do with capturing another's imagination and involvement. It might be possible to call VisiCalc `Art', but by the time it comes to Excel, it has become a tool.
Art is the fine end of a stretch that goes down to grunt-work. Hacking, painting, banging rocks, and writing are examples of work, the result of which falls between art and grunt work.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Ain't it the truth!
I play guitar and I do a bit of programming/web design. When I'm on stage raging out a solo, every woman in the house is ready to jump at me. But every damn one of them that I've given a chance has gotten this glazed look when they start talking to me. I guess I gotta work on that;-).
Actually, I'm a very happily married man. My wife happens to glaze over when I start talking about guitars and music. Go figure.
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This question can be applied to other areas as well and I think even moreso to web development. Most of the time, a web developer is asked to design a web site's layout as well as program it, while the artist's job is to provide the developer with graphics to slap into place.
Ideally, the artist should develop a site's layout with Dreamweaver or some other tool and the programmer should adapt that layout into their code. Why is it that this rarely happens?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and have you seen those beholders? They're ugly!
I've had this discussion/arguement with several friends. My girlfriend is a graphic designer/web developer and I'm a programmer/web developer. I was once told that "solving a problem creatively with code implies you are a good programmer, but it does not make you an artist."
My next question was "what makes a person an artist?"
The only answer was "creativity" and the arguement was over.
For example, an elegant user interface, by the very definition, is a combination of art and human engineering. Elegant code can certainly be called "art", while sloppy code can be likened to those famous fingerpaintings made by apes.
This is another good argument that can be used to illustrate why Copyright laws are so much more appropriate to software than patents. Only "design" patents even remotely approach applicability to software, and those only thinly, if at all.
While I would not say that some of my own programming efforts constitute great art, I certainly consider others to be artistic. I have put a great deal of creative effort into them.
Well, if programming is art than I'm definitely a still life piece since I do nothing at work!
Art in programming often means taking the route that isnt fastest, or creating something that is not useful whatsoever. It revolves around something which inspires the reader because of its uniqueness and inspiration. (not to be confused with MS's "innovation").
A good example was the most excellent and quite entirely useless TextQuake. A piece of art as far as i am concerned, and as stated by the creator, if you need to ask why it was done, you dont understand.
Programming is creative by nature, but being creative is not the same as being an artist. That would be like saying I am religious, just because I keep an open mind to the possibility of a higher power. Such a person would be spiritual. Religious implies they have a belief system. Describing someone as artistic implies the person is creating as a means of communicating feelings or ideas. Programmers are creative, but their end goal isn't based on expression (although how we get to the end goal may very well be an expression). This is, of course, just my opinion. I do believe some code is written as an art form (code for the sake of expression), but it is rare (those wonderful multiplying perl camels pop into my mind - http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/321a.html).
Game art isn't art - it is a craft. Interactive computer programmes have the potential to be art - but are not art in themselves. They contain illustrations and animations - they are meant to engage us to make the game more fun. THEY LOOK PRETTY!!! - yeah they look nice, but so do billboards...are they "art"? Art is about artistic intention; provoking a reaction- thought or emotion. The financial nature of games mean that the game is a product. Serra's rusty wall is art (he was paid for it but its purpose wasn't altered by financial considerations). diablo 2 is not($).
There are 2 characteristics that can define what most people agree that Art is:
-Any form of art can be appreciated by people that are not artists.
-Art influences our emotions and is aiming to do so.
Now, a C++ piece of code can be ingenious, even beautiful (beautiful in terms of what? Of how it looks? Of how efficent it is?) but it can't be appreciated by somebody that does not understand this technical artifact. As art it is useless. I would also question the sanity of somebody that feels such a thing has infatuated its senses in the same way a painting, a movie or a book will do.
A mathematical equation like E=m*c*c is beautiful for its simplicity, elegance and representative power, but again, its aim is not to touch our aesthetic senses, its aim is to explain a concept, and as such it is as artistic as the address written in an enveloppe.
Now, if you talk about a computer game (the final product you see and experience) then I agree it could be considered a form of art, after all it is like an interactive opera.
And of course if you make a painting with only Einstein's famous equation, then it becomes art because the artist is trying to make an statement about something.
So no guys, as much as most of you would like to believe you are like Beethoven, Picasso, Kubrik, Cervantes, Pavlova or Rodin, no you are not.
But be not sad! You are all great technicians and engineers, which is not small achievement.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That is just a bunch of sexist rubish and Cosmpolitan like propaganda. If somebody ever needed probe that "geeks" need go out and get some fresh air the previous message will probe it beyond reasonable doubt.
Girls aroused by source code, yeah.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Art (programming) trancends so many different aspects of life that it is obvious to me that programming is an art. When you design a game, program, or even a web site, you are inevitably incorporating story structure, design, character, plot, etc... Every object you create is in itself an artistic expression. You, Mr. Programmer, are more an artist than a Computer Technician. A Computer Technician spits out what a manual tells him to do. A programmer does what he feels...aka HE IS AN ARTIST.
As both an "artist" and a writer of code, I feel inclined to give my 2 cents... personally, I think that one can only be called an "artist" once it has turned the activity to a true art form. I was a potter for very many years, until I realized the flaws in my pottery, and made a huge jump in elegance and quality of pottery. About that time, my mindset changed a bit too. This is when I began considering myself an "artist" as opposed to merely a potter. I believe code-writing / game design is the same thing. One must turn the act of coding into an "art form", and write beautiful code before one can consider one's self an artist.......
Art has the ability to touch ones emotions, to touch ones soul if you will. To another engineer, a particularly clever bit of code may be art--it may inspire or touch them, but to most people, it would look like your cat walked across your keyboard.
Ken Musgrave has spent a lot of time exploring the concept of algorithm as art. His "Algorists" page is here.
Programming more like engineering - identifying a need and filling it using availiable assets. Sure, there's creativity involved, but no one's ever going to go to the 'Code Museum' and look at your code/app for its own sake.
You propose that art is a reflection of the world we live in. Is programming a reflection of the world we live in, or is it a part of that world? I'd argue the latter - no one is going to reflect on his/her cultural beliefs or the absurdity of life while buying a pair of sneakers over the internet. Well, they might, but only because buying a pair of sneakers over the internet is kind of absurd in and of itself. I certainly won't reflect on how many lines of code it took to implement the app.
I get tired of seeing terms that used to have meaning bastardized for the use of the technology industry. Maybe the only thing 'artistic' about most programs is the ego of their creators.
When I design a web page, there are two artistic elements involved. There is the interface and the back end. Two me, these two parts' aesthetics are equally important. A lot of the web pages I build could be made in Netscape Composer. But that would be Michaelangelo hiring an apprentice to paint the Sistine Chapel. Okay, maybe I've stretched the metaphor a bit, but you get the point. Similarly, I have friends who make nifty looking sites, but they do it entirely in Flash or Shockwave. Those web sites aren't art, because they are just pictures. They don't take advantage of all of the wonderful things HTML and dHTML can do. In the digital world, the structure of something, that is, what you can't see, is as important as what you can. All programmers, coders, etc, or at least all good ones, are artists.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Your's is a trick question or a troll. Making a game is the union of almost all forms of art and even much more. In a game you can use all the possibilities of photography, painting, music, literature and film. You can use a subset of the possibilities of sculpturing and drama. And there are so many possibilities unique to computer games. You also have to have a decent background in mathematics, and, depending on the game, almost every other science. just the fact that there is a gaming industry does not negate the fact that computer games are an art form.
A good game designer has to be firm in more areas of knowledge than most other professions and artists. It's just sad that so few are using the potential.
And if you have problems with the definition of art: every creator is an artist, every creation is a piece of art. Note the opposing sense of cloning and copying. But this doen't mean that copying can't be a medium of art.
Programming is an art, though not every piece of code is a piece of art. The only difference to most other arts is, that it can be much more appreciated by other programmers, such as music can be much more appreciated by musicians, but much more distinctive.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
I think most people will agree then, if this is the case, the Windows kernel is probably fairly well equatable to the horse manure flung against a wall that is now regarded as modern art.
The first are generally things like sculptures, paintings and stained-glass windows. More recently, photographs have been added to this list, and I see no reason that you cannot now add 3D modelling as well. I have seen some remarkable 3D rendered images that could only be considered works of art -- they are, quite simply, both remarkably beautiful and amazingly skillful.
The second type of art is stuff like poetry, where you have to actually read through it in order to appreciate it. Personally, I don't even think of this as art so much -- I am a writer, but I don't think of what I write as being art in itself. In many ways, writing a book and designing a game are remarkably similar, especially if you go to extreme lengths like I do, in designing vehicles, weapons, even sketching characters. That's unusual, and I only do it because I'm a designer as well. This second type of art is generally inspired either by the same things that inspire the first type, or by first type of art itself. That is to say, many poems are about landscapes, or people, just as are paintings. However, the second type allows far more abstract expression of ideas than the first type does -- and as such, good programming could, of course, be regarded as an art-form. However, it is much more difficult to quantify. A poem can be read by anyone and appreciated by anyone, but I can't imagine myself sitting down and reading six hundred lines of code because I think it's beautiful. It is, in this way, more like mathematics, which can also be beautiful.
I shan't go on because I'm not sure how well I can make my point in a shortish post. Basically, I think we have to distinguish between something that is beautiful and something that is art. They are not necessarily the same thing.
I'm not a programmer but I would think the information is shared between the programmer of the game, and the artist. In order to know how to create a particular scene in a game, the artist will need to know how the game is to be played, while on the other hand, the programmer will need to know how the graphics are drawn in order to code the game.
Its almost a give the programmer is swamped in code so they wouldn't be able to focus on the graphics, and vice versa, so I'm thinking some gaming companies have created their own propietary software to allow both the artist and the programmers to interact with themselves regarding code, and art.
hot game chicks
"When I was a Buddhist, it drove my parents and friends crazy, but when I am buddha, nobody is upset at all"
Each videogame represented the programmer's version of how he/she could exploit computational technology to create a virtual 'test of skill' which had evolved from pinball and before that carnival games (three throws for a nickel, three balls for a quarter, three bases in space invaders). Limitations in tools and the technology equally shaped those games. Often people create the greatest things when they have the fewest resources. It forces the designer to spend those resources on the most crucial pieces; namely the gameplay. Soon, the advances in tools and increase in technological resources made it impossible for a programmer to do it all anymore. Real artists were needed. Short-sighted game 'producers' then try and use this artwork as the motivating force behind the game's success, especially when coupled with a movie/tv licensed theme. Now you've got the movie/TV empire heads interested, and this emphasis on the aesthetic vs. the functional content increases as they bring in their funding, lawyers and distribution networks. Underneath this dogpile of people who contribute nothing to gameplay lie a handful of people still practicing the original game design craft who keep the heartbeat beating in spite of the situation. Will the trend reverse? If it's like the movie industry, the answer is probably 'no', though there will be pockets of innovation (i.e. Tarantino) - which quite honestly is fine by me. As an independent game developer, I could never compete with the big boys if they all got their act together.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
However..what about Games with extensive thought out environments? games that have complete musical scores that can be found no where else? games that show fantastic displays of processor power, and just make the player go "WOW!!"? If you are an experienced enough gamer you will find that there are games out there where a single look at the environmental art and you know who the designer is. You can Identify the musical and sound composers from the score of various games. You can identify who did the control scheme just by the feel of the character moving on the screen.
All these are indications of an Art form. People pouring their personalities into the works that they produce. The only reason why it's such a debate at this moment is because gaming is so mainstream that the artists are experiencing the fruits of their labors while they are still living. In reality, if fifty or 100 years pass and we look back at the games that have been produced, will we see them as we currently look back upon a Van Gogh, Rembrant, Picasso, or Renoir?
A previous poster had stated something along the lines of a computer is as much of an artists tool as a paintbrush. You have to ask yourself, what is the true meaning of Art? I have always seen the definition as a creation of a person's expression of his most heartfelt ideas. Sure some games are just comercial pushes, but the best games are more often truely art.
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The empty can may rattle the most, but a full can sure hurts like hell when it beans off some poor sap's forehead.
I assure you. Whether it's post-modern, popular, good, bad, ugly or indifferent, there's plenty of art out there. A child scrawling with crayons on a piece of paper is "art", and if someone wants to consider their program to be "art", sure, why not. The real question is: is it any good? The answer: Depends on who's looking at it. There are certain pieces of "art" that are very widely believed to be "good" or "great", but this just happens to be a consensus opinion. Personally, I like to judge art by the emotional experience it creates for me... by my interpretation, Beethoven's 5th is a wonderful piece of art, while your Perl script is terrible (although I may appreciate the great programming job you've done, for me personally, that just doesn't make it good art. Someone else probably feels differently).
There's tons of "art" in the world, and just because something is "art" doesn't mean it really has any value, any more than a child's drawing does. Is programming art? Sure. Are there any programs that are "good" art? Purely a matter of opinion...
...for a period of time. Looking at aviation as an example, the designers of the first airplane had to be extremely creative while building beautiful and intricate ideas. Nowadays, the bulk of the design is following a set of rules/equations/examples, which I would not consider art.
Just keep it simple.
I think if you look at what is called 'art' and trace it back, you'll find that ultimately it was a tool. Any new tool that is given to humanity, ultimately will be used by humanity to express ourselves. (Hammers and chisels to cut stone into tools, buildings, sculptures) Ultimately interacting with computers will be used to create art. If you loosely consider anyone who builds or creates something with a computer a programmer, then eventually _some_ programmers will be artists and the things created with computers will be art. It is especially interesting to look at cultures that have certain forms of expression supressed. I have a Mennonite background. Some 'sects' forbid owning / playing musical instruments. I have yet to hear a choir that can rival a Sunday morning service at an old coloney Mennonite church for wonderful natural harmony. If people only cut code for living, and don't express themselves outside of the app/dev cycle, eventually the code becomes a personal expression - in terms of layout of structures, names of variables, comments, etc. Supress this through coding standards and who knows where the expressive forces will emerge.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
"where is the line between art and programming" What a small pictured view this must come from. Imagine that there was a group of artists that were doing some sort of 'comuter oriented art' (not anything really with much merit in the field of computer science) like a sculpture of 100 monitors flashing on and off. There would be *many* small minded art critics and artists saying that the group responsible were 'very cutting edge'; 'on the cusp of technology'; etc. Some would even call them 'programmers' or pose the phrase "where is the line between programming and art." It would still be a dumb thing to say. -MF
This is an interesting topic. Before getting into coding I made a living (for lack of a better word) as a jazz musician. I'm very passionate about both coding and my art, but there is a huge difference. Beethoven said music isn't necessarily art. New Kids on the Block should never be confused with art. The art is in elevating people and causing them to feel. That is what art is. Great art is timeless. It has nothing to do with detail, or execution. Flawed execution or detail only exemplifies the humanity of art. Art is about emmotion. Therefore, I must conclude that while I think elegant code is nifty, it hardly makes me reflect on my life or how I feel about the world around me. Coding is more akin to science, and being passionate about science and logic is great, but it's not art. I think 'pure' science can be art. Einstein, Newton, Galileo and all the really huge figures of science certainly changed the way we look at the world around us, and changed the way we feel about our place in the universe as a result. That is art. As for comparing or invalidating art because it 'doesn't require as much attention to detail', all I can say is go and study music theory for a few years, then try to apply it to 1 instrument, then 4, then a small ensemble, then a whole orchestra. Art is every bit as demanding as coding. In some ways more so. Sad for me to say, but art is really valued very little in our (USA) society. Almost as little as teaching.
I'd say that some of a programmer's lack of attractiveness has to do with their art. After all, how many people have told you how great you look when you have huge bags under your eyes, just pulled a(nother) night without sleep and are jacked up on caffeine? Definately not a turn-on
Well, for a writing class I have written a poem as code. The teacher had no idea what the various commands meant, but still agreed that it was a well done piece.
I think that this is where the fundamental distinction between a Software Engineer and a Computer Programmer comes into play.
Software can, and should, be a defined process with specific inputs mapping to specific outputs.
It should be, but most of the time, it isn't.
This is quite unfortunate. We wouldn't have so much crap out on the market if we required software to be a rigorous formal process.
Art is for tall skinny guys in berets with black turtlenecks and girlfriends with funny accents who are lesbian.
Computer Science has artistic elements to it, as do all sciences, but Software Engineering, the act of producing a viable product, is just another manufacturing process. Yes, there are definite design considerations that are left to the individual, but at the end of the day it should be as cold and sterile as Cmdr. Taco.
BA == not an engineer
BS == you're a scientist dude
BSE, BE == you're an engineer, here's the obligatory pocket protector.
Regards,
I think what the question being asked is in actual game development, is the line between programmer and artist blurring? not in programmer and artist in general. He's just asking whether programmers are doing more art in games now.
We can't stop here! This is bat country!
I for one truly consider code an 'art'. I take personal pride in the code that I write, and crafting elegant routines, or nicely formatted code provide one of the main joys of coding for me. Have you ever looked at spaghetti code, then looked at something with appropriate whitespace, remarks, and proper logic? It is truly a thing of beauty!!
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Certainly, there is also that fact that a programmer's work is also by its nature boring to people who don't have an intimate knowledge of the field. I would hardly think that a lay person would find FreeBSD kernel internals interesting, beautiful, or even coherent. While most people are emotionally or otherwise affected by the traditional arts (I'm sure a lot of you know of a song that is particularly close to your heart), most people frankly don't give a damn about computer programming.
Think about it. Many people converse primarily about their field of expertise. The fact that almost everyone doesn't care about programming makes for some very boring people. When was the last time you saw a very dry and boring person get laid?
Is your company running tools written by ma
Steve Martin wrote a fantastic play covering (among other things) the question of art and science. It is called Picasso at the Lapin Agile and it is about a fictional meeting between Picasso and Einstein in a French bar just before each man made his discovery and changed his respective world. In one scene they challenge eachother to a contest to create something beautiful. They each grab a napkin and scribble furiously for a few seconds, then exchange napkins. Picasso looks up and says, "But this is just a formula!" Einstein's response, "Well, so is this."
I'm not sure there is a difference between the two at all. Programming often seems to be a cross between art and engineering.
Actually.. Would it matter wether computer code is nice or not? I have to admit that my programming skills are limited to good'ole Basic, but I do know this:
- People in general don't give a lick about how pretty the code is -
The only thing that's really important is how well it runs. You may call it an art, but unless it actually changes a program for the better, it's worth absolutely nothing.
The only exception is: if other people have to read the sourcecode. Open Source / multiple programmer environments do have to have well arranged code - to ease finding and changing what you are looking for.
My sock drawer is well arranged.. Does that make it a work of art?
I don't think so. But if my well arranged sock drawer allows me to get dressed in 20 seconds, that might be considered an art.
-- Haje Jan Kamps -- www.kamps.org -- Freelance journalist / Photographer
According to the dictionary art is a skill,a craft. Art in short, is something we create.
The only difference between "programming" and "art", is infact the medium upon which is chosen to perform the desired "art" or "skill".
programming just simply means an art form that utilises a programming language as it's medium.
design is an "art" form.
creating sound is an "art" form.
programming, is an "art" form.
basically the medium on which someone chooses to be creative, should not and does not make a single bit of difference, the point is, if it was created it involved some form of "art" or rather "skill" to do so.
Every single byte, bit, mime blob or script ever created is "art", no matter what form. "art" is just something that required individual skill to create and thus is unlimited in it's medium.
I create software, this requires skill, theirfore the result, my program; is art.
the mathematician and the programmer are involved in producing elegance. although artists, (perhaps programmers) and mathematicians may share psychological traits, the artist is not involved inelegance. look no further than damian hirst for an example of this
Glad to know that my BFA makes me a script kiddie although I have been supporting myself and others (sometimes a whole company) for over 20 years know. Those Fortune 100 companies must feel really bad that this non-CS person can do more things in more computer languages than their IT department. And they pay for it! And hundreds of thousands of people in the real world (not just the computer world) have used the programs. The best programmers I've ever met -- and there have been some damn good ones -- didn't have CS degrees. But we actually read Knuth, Wirth, Ritchie, et al, and try to learn from them. And most of the best are also musicians, artists, writers, not just programmers.
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
I've found that this and all similar issues go away if you eliminate the "a" word ( heretofore known as a** ) from the vocabulary. As a professional programmer and amatuer ( as in does it for love...not the erroneous 'not good enough to be paid' ) musician/composer I do not in any way want to be called an a**tist and will reject the false label until the day I die. If anyone considers any of my output to be a**, let them wallow in their unenlightenment...I know better.
;-7
As you can see from this discussion, no one knows what a** means or what it is. It doesn't exist. Lose the concept and gain clarity. Musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers, architects, athletes, ditchdiggers, whatever, none are a**tists because a** is just a self serving meme by which we pass quality judgement on what others do.
If you think you are an a**tist, or feel the need to belong to the a** world. Let it go. Forever reject the word, all it's variants and the associated baggage. You will then be free from the judgement of 6 billion+ a** critics and your creative output will soar to new heights.
Nothing is a**
No one is an a**tist
a** doesn't exist.
Now we can all get on with our lives.
( Don't even get me started about music and all those who would say " Music is..." or worse " Music should be...." )
This weekend I will go to a "painting" show and hang with the a**sy fartsy crowd
finis
Everyone's different...I am the same.
If you look over all of these arguments about what art is, what its not, if it is, and if its not. Art is what the world tells us it is. That is, if your being completely honest with yourself. The very opening statement, "a piece of code, or an elegant mathematical proof is as much art as a Picasso, or Beethoven's 5th Symphony." This person is lying to himself just by mentioning these two names with the word art. Sure the formal definition of Art can include code, proofs, games, science, math... theses art all logical things you can include. I wash the dishes perfectly everyday, this too is logically Art. But, what your reality of art actually is, is what our society dreams as art. Society is not yet at the point where you can mention Einstein and not think of scientist. You can argue all day long that YOU think good math is art and that YOU are more intelligent than the rest cuz you understand that "art" has no formal boundaries. Unfortunately, qualitative answers will never get you the answers you need. Humans are first and foremost social creatures and if society thinks and feels art is Picasso and Einstein was a scientist then that's how it is, you realize that you truly don't set the boundaries at all. These are the names the will be synonymous in all our thoughts and hearts for a long time to come. The problem is no-one wants to accept what they are, painter=artist, programmer=good at math person. Once you accept who and what you are, you then can realize that it is ok to be who you are. So, please lets stop lying to one another.