Software Art After Programming
Richard Wright
PDF [1250 KB]
First published
in MUTE magazine,
no. 28, Autumn 2004.
The history of computing in arts practice is littered with the
mental debris of its half-forgotten debates, unresolved problems
and anxieties, and questions that have now become as obsolete
as the Commodore 64s and VAX mainframes that accompanied them.
Who can remember the art and technology projects of the sixties
when the question of ‘Can the computer make art?’ allowed
a generation of isolated computer artists to position themselves
as a team of intrepid explorers setting out to cross a new continent
without first waiting to find out whether it could support life.
Under what conditions was the question ever first considered
worthy of posing in the first place? Did the computer offer input
into specific art issues, such as arts relation to other forms
of scientific knowledge, to language, representation or the abandonment
of the object? Or was it just intuitively realised that ‘computer
art’ was at the forefront of a slow, inexorable computerisation
of twentieth century society which would eventually demand access
to every facet of human culture?
As computer hardware and the programming skills needed to operate
it became more accessible, the question ‘Can the computer
make art?’ was asked less and less often. By the beginning
of the ‘80s artists were using the first personal computers
to produce more varied kinds of work until, with all this activity
growing, the question of whether art was possible on a computer
lost all sense. There was a moment when the parameters of the question
were redrawn, from ‘Can the computer make art?’ to ‘Can
a computer be an artist?’, redirecting it into issues of
simulated creativity and artificial intelligence. It was at this
point that the first cracks of a coming schism in the community
of computer artists became noticeable; this would go on to form
the next stage in the debate. It seemed to a growing number of
artists that as the complexity of software increased, so many new
possibilities for the human artist were appearing that the prospect
of deferring to a machine artist seemed almost indicative of a
lack of imagination.
Although the computer seemed to have made its case as a machine
of creative potential, there now emerged the question of how
to efficiently leverage all this creativity. By the late eighties,
the interactive interfaces and simplified menu commands of personal
desktop systems that had helped to cause this ground swell of
activity
had firmly refocused questions on the artists themselves. Were
the pre-packaged functions, options and parameters of the new
art applications sufficient to cover all artistic fields of inquiry,
all aesthetic nuances, all personal idioms? Or would it always
be necessary to have recourse to the precision and particularities
of programming languages in order to ensure that no desire was
left uncatered for? ‘Do artists need to program?’ became
the burning question at SIGGRAPH panel sessions and electronic
art festivals.
To some extent this divergence between programmers and program
users masked the fact that they had become two sides of the same
coin. As the argument went, the artist-programmer would regard ‘software
not as a functional tool on which the “real” artwork
is based, but software as the material of artistic creation’,
as the Transmediale Software Art jury statement would phrase it
much later in 2002. On the other hand, for program users, programming
was only ever a means to an end. Yet it was their fixation on this
end that hastened their acquiescence to the means of their programs
and the reconfiguration of their practice by programmers. ‘Is
the computer a medium or a tool?’ Yes, it was true that some
artists were only interested in software ‘tools’ that
were totally subservient to their subjectivity, but it was a subjectivity
that was now mapped onto minutely variable parameter lists and
option check boxes, mirroring the remoteness of the artist’s
precious and peculiar visions by burying its origins deep within
the recesses of multiple menu layers. Aided by the runaway success
of packages like Amiga’s Deluxe Paint, Adobe Illustrator
and Photoshop, software manufacturers were redefining the creative
process as a decision making process converging towards a predetermined
ideal goal.
The problem was also attacked from the opposite direction by
a top-down system design employing pre-sets, wizards, helpers,
macros
and plug-ins that pre-empted the creative process by offering
a one button solution to achieve those essential lens flares,
ripples,
rollovers and drop shadow effects. The users of programs now
found themselves programmed by their very own favourite artistic
effects,
expressed as a suite of easy to use software extensions. In the
end, both artist programmers and artist program users produced
artwork that was about the software that had produced it. Both
became caught up in a wider move to rewrite society in terms
of information processing.
By the early ‘80s the artist Harold Cohen had developed software
to automate his own personal artistic style. A former successful
gallery painter, Cohen still works on a suite of artificial intelligence
programs called AARON that seek to encode his earlier painting
practice. Cohen had always insisted that the content of his work
was the software itself, and always exhibited the entire process
in the form of a live computer connected up to a mobile painting
device or ‘turtle’ that would scuttle over his canvases.
As he told his students, ‘Don’t ask what you can do
with the software, ask what the software can do.’ But Cohen’s
work now seems to function more as evidence of a historical transition
that occurred over his working life and reached its culmination
during the ‘90s. While we have been watching Cohen’s
computer prove it can recreate art, other computers have been recreating
our whole society in their own image. But this new image is not
the image of the expressive subject that is simulated in Cohen’s
work. It is the image of the subject as a node, a switching station
for providing feedback to calibrate the central processing system,
the individual’s expressive utterances only called upon to
ensure their movements are correctly synchronised. The artist programmer
of today exists in relation to a whole culture that has the computer
as its central organising technology. The pervasive quality of
software culture and the resultant normalisation of computer use
have made it impossible to maintain the conceptual categories that
underpinned previous debates. In a world where artists use software
to write software that will be seen by virtue of other software,
questions about the ‘aesthetics of the code’ become
a symptom of not being able to see the wood for the trees. Programming
is not only the material of artistic creation, it is the context
of artistic creation. Programming has become software.
One interesting example of the end game of the debate on ‘Computer
Art’ is a piece of artist’s software called Auto-Illustrator.
Written by Adrian Ward around the year 2000, Auto-Illustrator was
the prize winner of the first competition for Software Art organised
by Berlin’s Transmediale media art festival in 2001. Ward
describes the work as a parody of commercial art and design packages
like Adobe Illustrator, specifically of their pretensions to provide
functionality and user control. In contrast, Ward fills his package
with ‘generative art’ tools that explicitly try to
automate the drawing process. The appearance of Auto-Illustrator
when running is much like a typical menu driven art and design
package with the exception that the tool palette and effects filters
incorporate generative algorithms. For instance, the Pencil tool
adds wiggles or sweeps to your strokes, while the Oval tool will
use settings like ‘childish’or ‘adult’ to
control a sprinkling of little faces. Some tools like Brush seem
entirely random in operation, while some filters like ‘Instant
Mute Design’ will reproduce an entire iconography designed
to appeal to the Digerati generation.
In fact, many of these generative techniques are strikingly reminiscent
of various experiments in computer art from over the last thirty
years. The line tools generate scribbles using algorithms almost
certainly related to the stochastic perturbations of Frieder
Nake or Peter Beyls while the ‘bug’ tool roves around the
screen using the same principles as Harold Cohen’s turtle
graphics engine. Even the icons of the ‘Instant Mute Design’ effect
are almost identical to Edward Zajec’s permutations of cubic
modules. In this way, Auto-Illustrator is like a compendium of
classic computer art programs but now presented as a list of menu
options with conveniently editable parameters. Presented in this
context, the individual aesthetics of each of these venerable pioneering
practices are erased, leaving us with more of a confusion of idiosyncratic
styles. From this viewpoint, Auto-Illustrator’s ‘generative
tools’ actually pastiche the chaotic ‘feature mountain’ of
bloated modern software systems, as they are commonly disorganised
by the superabundance of toolbars, drop-down lists and floating
inspectors. Instead of defining a drawing function, it might have
been more relevant for Ward to have his ‘bug’ tunnelling
into the dizzying depths of cascading sub-menus and option boxes
to find that single cherished function with which the user nurtures
their unique individual style. Ward actually states that wider
issues such as interface design are of no interest to him and describes ‘consumer-based
application software’ as his chosen medium. Auto-Illustrator
is successful in its intention to parody the functionality-as-expression
of mainstream software design, but only at the level of coding.
By not addressing the wider user experience it is unable to think
outside of the window box in which this functionality is now defined.
Since Auto-Illustrator’s release there has been at least
one attempt to account for a contemporary digital aesthetic with
reference to the design of a family of software packages and related
technologies. In 2002 the theorist Lev Manovich published ‘Generation
Flash’, an essay in which he tried to characterise a then
prevalent cultural sensibility. Manovich referred to the prevailing
visual style of Flash, Shockwave and Java based multimedia as ‘soft
modernism’, a reaction against the clutter of postmodern
eclecticism that returns to an elemental ‘rationality of
software’. Aesthetic motifs are defined by Manovich in terms
of technologically motivated processes: instead of appropriation
we simply have the sample, a basic operation in the new mode of
cultural production. Another cultural building block is the network,
and therefore also one of the terms of a new critical language.
These operations (networking, sampling) are applied in new modes
of expression like data visualisation. This can be seen, for instance,
in Futurefarmer’s They Rule project in which the directors
of the USA’s top corporations are cross referenced to purportedly
reveal a web-like pattern of interrelated allegiances. For Manovich
this kind of work replaces older forms of authored representation
by giving us the tools to objectively analyse raw data and deduce
the necessary conclusions.
Although Manovich’s detailed analysis of the structural basis
of new media adds an absolutely essential dimension to new critical
tools, the approach risks being interpreted as a form of technological
determinism once we lose sight of a specifically cultural perspective.
For example, our understanding of the workings of the corporate
world order do not arise automatically out of its most common data
visualisations, such as the stock market fluctuations diagrammatically
portrayed on the Financial Times website. Not all visualisations
are equal. At one point Manovich argues that the ‘neo-minimalism’ of
the Flash style arises quite naturally from the practice of programming – the
pixel thin grid lines, restricted colour palettes, abstracted symbols ‘ALWAYS
happens when people begin to generate graphics through programming
and discover that they can use simple equations, etc’ (Manovich’s
emphasis). This is indeed the case where programming is taught
within a certain computer science tradition, but it is now impossible
to discount the influence of scripting environments such as Flash.
Not all programming practices are equal.
Other discussions of Flash have merely tended to shift the technological
focus, such as whether the limited bandwidth of the web was the
most significant reason for the linear aesthetic of vector graphics.
At other times it moved on to question the ‘openness’ of
the Flash graphics standard, whether Macromedia would ultimately
allow programmers to leverage the full potential of its functionality.
However, the ‘functionality’, ‘rationality’ or ‘potential’ of
software will always be strictly unknown. It is the ‘user
experience’ of software, the values generated by the way
it is meant to be used, how it gives shape to a practice, how easily
a technical ‘potential’ can be perceived and engaged
with that should form the basis of software critique. It is possible
to trace many formative influences on the Flash style not to the
code itself, but to the conditions in which it is written. Programming
is now often practised in the form of ‘scripting’ languages
that are integrated into mainstream art and design software applications.
This makes artist programmers and program users both subject to
the same philosophies of system design that hold sway in point-and-click
style desktop packages. By examining these environments we can
find many ways in which they funnelled Flash Actionscript or Director
Lingo programming practice into nourishing certain wider cultural
sensibilities during this period.
Multimedia scripting languages like Flash Actionscript tend to
differ from conventional programming languages by offering access
to a library of functions that are specific to that particular
multimedia application. This easy access to a set of predefined ‘events’ such
as mouse clicks, drag actions and rollovers is somewhat analogous
to the way a software user’s practice is structured in terms
of the predefined configuration of menu commands, option boxes
and plug-in effects. These library functions that populate the
programmers imagination with a readymade vocabulary of discrete
interactive ‘behaviours’ can be coded up and attached
to individual multimedia objects – button triggers, sprite
actions, sound effects, linkages, etc. Actionscript therefore tended
to differ from typical program development environments by identifying
code with graphical and other concrete entities that would become
principle actors in the interactive scenario. This also tended
to discourage the writing of long passages of control logic and
instead led to the writing of terse mathematical expressions to
manipulate an object’s properties, movements and relationships
to other objects. When combined with the instancing abilities of
the Object Orientated Programming philosophy, Actionscript became
very efficient at applying these code segments to multiple copies
of ‘semi-automated’ graphic elements, sprites, movie
clips and sounds. As implemented in multimedia authoring software
like Flash, Object Orientated Programming actually fostered an ‘object
orientated’ approach to interactive art and animation.
The point here is to look at Flash at the moment at which its
patterns of techniques and processes re-emerge as motifs that
can enter
consciousness and practice on an aesthetic level. To start with
we have an authoring system that orientated the user towards
the replication (or ‘birthing’) of multitudes of objects
and orchestrating complex yet concise interactions between them.
It is even possible to identify the most common form of mathematical
expression that was used to regulate this interaction during the
millennial Flash period. There is a single line of code that appears
over and over again, a simplified expression that produces a distinctive
dampening effect on a moving object before it finally comes to
rest. It was easy for Flash users to apply this expression to any
or all of ones objects and events until it produced the classic
Flash ‘wobble’. A Flash site became a constellation
of rippling, bobbing, trembling buttons, icons, eyeballs, legs
and rollover items as if someone had poured a bucket of water into
your computer monitor. In the open source spirit, the Flash community
ensured that such expressions were quickly disseminated until they
became an almost universal kinetic attribute.
The Flash style was integrated, via its web browser plug-in,
to other desktop based work and leisure patterns of activity.
By keying
into the internet gold rush fever, Flash art was turned into
a highly visible design component of the dotcom boom era. This
new
informal space imbued Flash art with the role of a distraction,
a demo or toy, making any more demanding appreciation of its
fluid stylistic and tactile qualities unnecessary. The net culture
of
the time also provided a preexisting discourse in which it’s
visual aesthetic could be interpreted and flourish. Echoing the
ubiquitous net-cultural meme of the ‘digital Gaia’ – an
ecological interpretation of the web of globally interconnected
and independent agents – foremost Flash designer Joshua Davis
commented: ‘our work should reflect the nature of a fern
and be comprised of tiny little objects that all talk to each other.
The more we add these little objects, the more complex and intense
the nature of our work becomes.’
There are many more factors that could be marshalled to ‘explain’ the
Flash style. But as far as practising artists are concerned, how
can we get a handle on such a deluge of widely different factors,
some of which seek to align us with a particular model of subjectivity
and others which just seem like arbitrary collections of protocols?
How can we forge a path through layer after layer of designed information
to form ways of working not pre-empted by the predicates of current
software culture?
There are some emerging ideas that might help. One of these is
the ‘techno-aesthetic’ – different motifs that
permeate these technological, social and cultural levels. The
idea is rooted in materialist notions of social process, but
a society
now constituted through IT. The emphasis is on how specifically
cultural forces can form technology into a means of expression
that is able to exceed its most obvious properties and structures.
One software art example of this in action is Mongrel’s
often-cited Linker project of 1999. Developed to support a series
of story
telling workshops for the non-expert computer user, the software
is a highly stripped down system that simply allows users to
load and make connections between a collection of digital elements – images,
text, video, sounds. For a start, this transfers an emphasis
on the practice of the software to the practice of the user.
Compared
to the other examples, Linker coheres around a figure that unites
its levels of thought and construction yet retains an open space
in which imagination can breathe. As theorist Matthew Fuller
described Linker, ‘It relies on the simple function of
doing exactly what the name says it does – link things.
Here, the poetics of connection forms a techno-aesthetic and
existential a priori
to the construction of a piece of software.’ This aesthetic
is made explicit when the software is first launched – it
displays a map image of its three by three grid of interconnected
regions. Linker is constructed around this image of itself that
communicates and instantiates its underlying algorithmic structure,
creative use and conceptual model. It is this figuration of itself
as an idea that makes Linker art as well as software.
The debate about Linker was unfortunately always limited to its
mode of production and the social constituency of its intended
user group as though it had been designed as a tool of social
engineering, ready to arise fully formed out of a sub-menu check-box
list of
community ‘needs’. But discussions of DIY empowerment,
Open Source and the ‘sociability’ of software are presumptuous
without any attention to the context in which imaginative ideas
can grow. When we look at the kinds of applications that have actually
resulted from Linux we simply see copies of standard Microsoft
functionality. The Open Source model of production is a dead end
without an equivalent ‘model of creativity’, defaulting
instead to a wannabe culture. Instead we should look for inspiration
in practices that could nourish a poetics of data ‘copyability’ such
as plagiarism and detournement, as noted by writer Josephine Berry.
But unfortunately free software developers do not prioritise this
aesthetic context which is what has the power to determine whether
software will enable or restrain its user’s perceptions and
mode of action.
It is not a matter of the different technical abilities of software
or of how much it costs, but of how easily a technical potential
can be perceived by the user in a way that motivates engagement.
When software is written, choices must be made about which data
fields carry value, how the display of information forms contours
of meaning, how the modelling of the interface moulds the subjectivity
of the user. The question of whether artists should learn to
program is replaced by the question of what kind of programming.
Which
programming practice has the most ‘open aesthetic’,
capable of making software that is not just the product of an arbitrary
confluence of techniques or a slavish mimicry but is aware of all
its possible formative cultural and philosophical categories and
values.
For the first generation of artist programmers there was hardly
any information society in existence, certainly not one within
reach. In the early eighties during a period when the launch
of the personal computer marked a radical shift in computer culture,
artist Harold Cohen stressed the importance of asking the right
questions. Now that we live in a world in which his AARON program
is downloadable as a screen saver it is time for us to extend
his
question – ‘Don’t ask what the software can do,
ask what it can do to other software.’
URLS
 Auto-Illustrator
Joshua
Davis
Linker & 9
AARON
screensaver
Acknowledgement
This article was based on research supported by a grant from
the Arts and Humanities Research Board.
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