My Presentation
Iterative art: from reactive (trigger-release) to visualizing data (see also DmIterateToVisualize)
Ben Fry: organic data visualization
see DmBenFry
Christiane Paul on Software Art
Formalism vs. Culturalism
Software art as set of formal instructions verse its role in cultural reflection
- algorithmic appreciation
- generative art
- code poetry
- data transformation,
- digital folk and artisanship (e.g. ascii art and screen savers)
- existing software manipulations (cracks and patches or plugins)
- political and activist software
Netomat
"Maciej Wisniewski's netomat... abandons the page format of traditional browsers and treats the Internet as one large database of files... Using an audiovisual language designed specifically to explore the unexplored Internet, netomat reveals how the ever-expanding network interprets and reinterprets cultural concepts and themes and takes visitors for a ride into the Internet's subconscious."
FEED
"Mark Napier's
Alex Mclean's forkbomb.pl
"a script written in Perl that creates an artistic impression of the user's computer system under pressure (by repeatedly creating new processes at such a speed that the system comes to a halt). -
Binary Aesthetics of code
"Software art pieces can present themselves as anything ranging from visuals (driven by a largely hidden layer of artist-written code) or as the written code itself... The aesthetics of artists who write their own source reveal themselves both in the poetics of the code and its visual results as actions derived from it." (see also DmDigitalMaterials and Cox, Mclean, Ward:
Developing new, generative visualizations
"Digital art in general ultimately represents data... software art is more concerned with the generative construction process of data representation... we are facing a major transformation of the status of representation itself, which becomes a process that constitutes a convergence of language and mathematics, which in turn has the potential to drive a multi-sensory 'display.'"
Data visualization/ recontextualization
" In software art that is focused on data visualization - the creation of visual models for data sets - the issue of context becomes particularly important. For any given set of data, there are multiple possibilities for giving it a visual form, which in turn lend themselves to reconfiguration. This again leads to contextual shifts: the context provided for creating meaning of any given set of data is to a large extent determined by the dynamics of the interface... While there needs to be a certain focus on and reflection of the data changes at any point, the visual model tends to turn into a form of wallpaper (no matter how beautiful it is) if it loses the larger context of the data sets."
Concepts, Notations, Software, Art, by Florian Cramer
Software is not Media!
"aisthesis (perception) over poeisis (construction), cheapened into a restrained concept of art as only that what is tactile, audible and visible... If at all, computer processes become 'media' only by the virtue that computers can emulate any machine, including all technical media, and by the virtue of the analog interfaces which transform the digital zeros and ones into analog sound waves, video signals, print type and vice versa."
Types of Software Art
- Executable Code in Art
- Concept Art and Software Art: "Concept art as an art 'of which the material is `concepts,' as the material of for ex. music is sound' (Henry Flynt, Concept art. In La Monte Young and Jackson Maclow, editors, An Anthology. Young and Maclow, New York, 1963 (1961).) and software art as an art whose material is formal instruction code seem to have at least two things in common"
- Software Formalism vs. Software Culturalism
In class discussion
- When software allows you to see the world in a new way, it moves towards art
- When visualizing data, focus on what you don't understand, what connections you cannot see, what you are interested in
- it becomes wallpaper when you lose the context