On 02 Nov 2010, at 03:00, Douglas Bagnall wrote: > some very interesting words about coding styles & artistic flow-through > effects of such
i wanted to add something to this discussion. i don't see code as my medium, and as such code is to me a tool. when working on my own there's usually a physiological/neurologic sensation of my own (usually somewhat 'gestalt'y) that i'm wanting to explore, and so i construct code (and/or electronics) to do so. there is of course room for following fruitful bugs in there, but in general i believe strongly in the craft of code: code that is well-written expresses material properties when it executes that affect the audience perception of the work. my wife, on the other hand (http://liaworks.com), operates in a way that is more analogous to sculpture. once she has a basic programme up and running (eg 100 circles all moving from left to right on the screen), it becomes a process of poking and squeezing the code until it starts doing something interesting, and then massaging that interesting result into something she can use. i've watched her doing this: she'll literally pick a piece of maths in the code and swap a - for a +, or add a modulo 2 operator, or reorder boundary tests and velocity calculations so that things are happening at times that i as an engineer would not think to do because they're 'too late' or 'too early' to be 'correct', but which as a result lead to interesting visual effects. point, this is yet a third way of dealing with code. add perhaps even a fourth way for how i feel Douglas' practise operates. Douglas seems to start from a conceptually interesting standpoint, develop the idea through thought and theory, and then only write the code once the idea has been fully fleshed out. the code then is the proof that the idea functions as an algorithm, but in a sense the execution/output of the code in his case is often of less importance than its conceptual framework. i'd go so far as to suggest that the different approaches we've been discussing (engineering, bricolage, sculpture, conceptual) are different kinds of practise and, from a theoretical perspective, grow out of quite different concerns. dd -- damian stewart . @damiannz . [email protected] frey . contemporary art . http://www.frey.co.nz _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
