September 24, 2002
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder ... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
The Whitney Museum of American Art has commissioned an art show entitled "CODeDOC." Available solely online, it's part of the larger "Artport" project, its Internet portal to net and digital arts.
What's intriguing about this latest show is that it requires you to view the underlying computer software before you can see the artwork. It's like making you examine the engine and drive train, before you get to look at the sports car.
Twelve commissioned artists were given a straightforward assignment. Their art "should move and connect three points in space." And not to interfere with their artistic freedom, this assignment could be "interpreted in a visual or more abstract way."
As a computer programmer, I can tell you - this creative appreciation of our work seldom comes our way.
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Programming is more than bits and bytes. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, says it well: "When you look at the pure engineering side, the only thing that matters is: how well does this program work? On the other side, you can do it in many different ways. It can be stable, but it can be ugly as hell. So the other side of software engineering is really taste. It's about beautiful code. ... When I program, I want the code to be beautiful."
Now, everyone knows that where there's art, there are art critics. And while these art critics will have their say about the digital art, what might they say about the software?
And then the light bulb came on - I can't begin to critique art, but I can definitely critique software! So, I knew exactly what I would do - I'd look at the artist's computer programs ... and none of their art.
That, I'd leave to the art critics.
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In all, I'd give the artists high marks for program structure, and the formatting of their code was both visually appealing and easy to read. They varied more on the quality of their comments. Some had magnificent descriptions throughout, while others had none. The best described both program technique as well as artistic concept. And the worst didn't even give the artist's name.
Remarkably, unlike professional computer programmers, it appears that artists can actually spell, and I outright applaud the refreshing comment: "This function does all kinds of stuff."
I also looked into the complexity of their solutions. Some were simplistic, showing no imagination. Others were simple in implementation, but supported an imaginative concept. One program I classified as a "non-effort," while another exploited our short-lived fascination with new technology. And one artist went rapping on and on throughout his comments about chaos and meta-chaos. I wanted to shout that any program as literal as his would never be chaotic.
(Gee whiz! Now who's sounding like an art critic!)
Each Sunday you will find lovers strolling hand-in-hand through the Whitney Museum of American Art, so why don't all you geeky couples out there carve out a Sunday afternoon soon? Turn off your cell phones. Turn on your laptops. Bring up whitney.artport.org on the Web. Snuggle up together and weave your way through these programs. Enjoy the beauty you find there. The rest of the afternoon is up to you.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
