Slashdot Mirror
Hackers: The Art of Abstraction
scubacuda writes "Wired: Inspired by McKenzie Wark's The Hacker Manifesto , Madrid's MNCARS's exhibit, Hackers: The Art of Abstraction , explores the connections between hackers, artists and anyone engaged in any kind of creative work. The centerpiece of the exhibition are documentary films and videos made by independent filmmakers and hackers from all over the world, including Freedom Downtime by Emmanuel Goldstein, Free Radio by Kevin Kayser, The Hacktivist by Ian Walker, Unauthorized Access by Annaliza Savage, New York City Hackers by Stig-Lennart Serensen and Hippies From Hell by Inne Pope."
Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham is a great read on why artists and hackers have similar interests and mindsets. A must-read for hackers.
If it's an art, it's more like architecture: you have to conform to strict rules or your code won't compile/building will fall over. There may even be rules imposed by others: coding standards/building regs. Then there's ergonomics to take into account: GUI design/ergonomics of building use.
But within those restrictions, there's still a lot of freedom to express oneself creatively.
This expansion of the term "hackers" is a great idea. Now if we could just combine it with the idea of making really "creative hacks" patentable, we might have a solution to the whole mess of US Patents, and democratize the gold rush towards the "patent extortion money" pie.
Think about it for a moment. Creativity deserves to be patentable. Once a hack is patented the "hacker" will then try to dissuade others from using it till they pay him for the rights to use it. Thus we have transferred the policing of the hack to the hacker itself! That is advantage number one.
Advantage number 2 stems from the fact that why let SCO (and other similar scum) try to get away with the patent extortion money. Let all the others who are really creative (hackers) get a share of it too. This way, everyone, programmers, artists, musicians, writers, engineers, chemists, and so on, are now eligible for patents (much better than the measley copyrights) and the patent extortion pie.
And the bonus advantage of making the "creative hacks" patentable is that it would flood the US Patent Office and wash away its patenting sins, and maybe force it to stop giving out dumb patents.
.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Ditto.
In the time it would have taken me to read that I could have coded a web server, downloaded the X2 demo and solved the Middle Eastern peace problem.
What ever happened to the art of being concise?
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
IMHO :
:
Art is the expression of a feeling. A painter, a poet expresses his feelings thru his artwork, and maybe, sometimes, it reaches the audience, and this audience may (or may not) feel the same.
Hacking is not art.
It's "performing a task".
It's "solving a problem".
Even if a hack is well-written code, it does not carry any kind of emotion or feeling. Of course, somebody who watches the code may feel a couple of things
- surprise : hey it works ! waow !
- hate : gush ! I wish I could have written that !
etc...
But the first intention of the hacker is not to provoke feelings. It's just doing a job. Doing it well, if possible.
Furthermore, I never believed that randomly-generated artworks could be considered as art, because equations or math formula cannot carry human emotions.
Sorry, you're wrong. Code is art. We're talking about design, not mechanics. Questions like: functional, procedural, or object-oriented design paradigm? Plug-ins or scripting for extension? How will networking and persistence be handled? How will the software test itself? Which design patterns should be applied in what combination?
The choices require experience and creativity, and it is truly art and beauty at the design level. If you can't see it as art, then sorry, you lack the design experience to understand.
"it is making a "stable" state out of chaos"
When the microwave was invented was it chaos? Or was it someone wanted a quicker way to cook? The tools to do the same things already existed but weren't as easy. Where is the chaos in that?
Evolution or ID?
The poem you refer to is a perfectly legitemate program in whitespace. Depending on the use of tabs newlines and spaces in the poem, it might actually do something useful as well.
Well, maybe for the few true geniuses out there. But for most hackers it's merely a skill, maybe a craft at most.
Everything a human can do is an art. High art is merely the pinnacle. We all strive toward it to some extent. An "artist" may simply be one who works for that specific reason.
must... stay... awake...
The Microwave heating abilities were discovered when fried pigeons kept falling down around a radar-center somwhere. (No, I didn't bother to google)
It was definetly not an invention out of a ingenious mind, more like a random discovery when doing something completely unrelated.
Out of chaos/not-chaos, this would have to be chaos. But I'd rather say coincidental.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I think there are as many definitions of what constitutes "art" as there are aspiring artists (or their parasitical campfollowers, art critics).
I'm a traditionally trained commercial artist. (You are welcome to slashdot my site at spanishcastle.com to confirm that pronouncement). I also have done a limited amount of programming. I find them to be two distinctly different experiences, but not altogether different. I think any act of creation done in the pursuit of excellence can be considered art.
However, I tend to prefer my own simple formula for answering the age old question: is it art? They are:
1) Is it beautiful? (which is a loaded question, too, really)
2) Would you have it in your home? (or, in the case of large works, in your town?)
3) Five hundred years from now, when some future archeologist digs it up, will it still be recognizable as art?
Obviously, some art forms are simply too ephemeral (like music or dance) to meet these conditions completely...although you could also argue that the best of them are preserved in one fashion or another (symphonies are committed to paper, and dances are taught to the next generation)
I think programming might be considered more akin to graphic art than fine art.
Fine art is a form of expression. I am not sure how well programming does this. Were it not for commented code, I don't how one could discern the author of a great piece of code from another.
Graphic art is a form of communication, which programming is designed to do, after a fashion. It is a means whereby a person may communicate with a machine.
Perhaps only machines know the difference? Perhaps we are bearing witness to a new form of art: machine art. Maybe one day, sentient machines will look and marvel at the elegance and simplicity of some tidy bit of code with the same fascination and admiration we might admire an artist's rendering of our own universe today.
I'm still waiting for both hardware and software manufacturers to address the issue of permanence, though...
The idea that something is "art" is a pretty recent idea, in the big scheme of things. What distinguishes "art" from a well crafted thing is difficult to define.
Throughout most of history there were people who mastered crafts. They might be sculptors, painters, cabnetry-makers... And we might look at what they did and say "Hey, that's art! He's a real artist." But what does that mean?
The programmer who writes a workable kludge is a craftperson, and doesn't aspire to art. Yet if s/he is trying to do something more than simply get the damn program to work, the code might be art. It might be beautiful. It might be clever. Might even be a commentary on larger themes... rather like what I conceive of as art.
In my wholly subjective view, craft is craft, art is craft that aspires to do more. And if that is so then why couldn't a hacker produce art? But feel free to disagree!