Code As Muse
Excerpt from "Code As Muse," in Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006)
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Online artists manipulate digital code to make art much as the immune system manipulates genetic code to make antibodies. Some of the most renowned online artists take this practice to an extreme by following Cornelia Solfrank's dictum, 'A smart artist makes the machine do all the work.'1 Now, trusting a machine to make art is already an enormous departure from the direct gesture of hand-brushing oil paint on canvas. In the case of Internet art, the remove is even greater, since the machine in question is not the artist's but one owned by a viewer who might be halfway around the world. To get someone else's PC to draw lines, flash colors, or spin words across the screen, Internet artists rely on instructions which can be stored on a disk or squeezed through a modem line. These instructions take the form of code.
Why would artists forego the directness of squeezing out tubes of cadmium red or chiseling away chunks of marble in favor of disembodied commands? For many practitioners, code is not simply a means to an end; on the contrary, they revel in the intricacies of document.write; they chisel lines of Perl or Java instead of marble, creating elegant solutions to artistic problems. Code is their muse.
But professional computer programmers also pride themselves on elegant solutions, even though the solutions in question may be to mathematical conundrums or e-commerce applications. If programming is an art, is any programmer with high standards an artist? No. As we shall see, software artists deliberately misuse code. Like the immune system's polymorphous antibody production, this perverse practice lends code art a quirky and prophetic vision that is unlikely to emerge from a purely utilitarian approach.
Like many self-proclaimed examples of software art, John F. Simon, Jr.'s Every Icon (page 19) embodies the procedural2 aesthetic Judson Rosebush espoused in 1989. According to Rosebush's manifesto, the goal of computer art is to create the greatest richness and meaning from the fewest lines of code. But if code art's yardstick for aesthetic success is 'the biggest bang for the buck', how do we judge the merit of Proceduralist art against such remarkable achievements of the scientific community as the Mandelbrot Set (page 18), whose single-line formula generates an astounding wealth of complex iterable shapes? One clue lies in the irony of Simon's failed promise to deliver every conceivable image, which provokes the question of whether software must be devious to qualify as art.3
As we'll see, the answer helps to resolve a debate that has raged in the past decade among creative coders who champion formal versus social values. The invention of software in the twentieth century produced a new medium for artistic expression. Like literature or painting, software can be appreciated from the inside out (basing an interpretation on a program's syntax, or internal architecture) or from the outside in (reading the function of a software application against a broader social context). The key to understanding the connection between these two readings will turn out to be a feature that sets software apart from these earlier media: its capacity for utility. Performative speech is rare outside a courtroom, but almost all computer programs are performative in some way. If our definition of art is to adapt to a twenty-first-century context, then its characteristics must adapt to accommodate this subtle but seismic shift in media.
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