Sometimes I see pieces of software that are so brilliant that they evoke emotions in me. e.g. when google maps came out, or when the first iphone came out. Do you consider any software to be art? If so, which one?
(Peter Norvig's take on the matter, quoted from "Coders at Work" by Peter Seibel)
Seibel: "As a programmer, do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman?"
Norvig: "Well, I know when you compare the various titles of books and so on, I always thought the "craft" was the right answer. So I thought art was a little pretentious because the purpose of art is to be beautiful or to have an emotional contact or emotional impact, and I don't feel like that's anything that I try to do... I think craft is really the right word for it. You can make a chair, and it's good looking, but it's mostly functional--it's a chair."
...So you can take some paint, and make a mural or paint your garage. One of these things is art and the other probably isn't. As a result, it's what you do with it that makes it art or not.
This quote is talking about like what this dude thinks he does; it has no application to anyone else that identifies as a programmer.
It's Peter Norvig. He definitely paints murals when he's writing code. If his code doesn't qualify as art then there's hardly anyone on the planet who's can.
I don't know how is it for you folks, but for me software is an enabler for a gazillion of things - whether it is art, science, education or practical tool for life. Many processes in software development resemble those used in arts (building cathedrals as an often mentioned example comes to mind), so in the end software can end up being art by itself. However it can be much more, it can be all of inspiring art, pragmatic tool, scientific instrument, fun making gadget, transcending and grouping all of this, and it can devalue everything as well, depending on what mental imprint it obtained from its creators.
Ernest Hemingway to Irving Penn:
"Your photos are really good. What camera do you use?"
Irving Penn to Ernest Hemingway:
"Your novels are excellent. What typewriter do you use?"
I was going to say this, glad someone already did. It allows you to express or produce a variety of things, one of which is art. You might even try to produce software that is itself art. But software by itself is merely a material to be worked with.
I would say yes, software can be art. Just from a general point of view, video games are a subset of 'software', and I would consider them art.
But if you decide to ignore games, as you mentioned things like google maps can evoke awe and beauty. I would call that art.
as for examples, I find compilers to be beautiful. I love the way a well designed grammar comes together and the way that we can read a conforming program and turn it into a new program.
Art and craft are closely related, but I think software is more craft than art. If I had to come up with a distinction I might say that craft is art done for a practical purpose. So software could be art if it was done for no other reason than an expression of an aesthetic or ideal, but otherwise I would call it a craft.
i am a software artist (yup says so on my business card) and i give this a hearty "yes". but not in the usual sense of code that is elegant or well crafted, that's just good engineering. code becomes art when it is made with the intention of an artist. this is actually quite rare. video games barely count because most of the artistic content are just 3d models. some do count though.
the most true software art is generative art: algorithms that produce abstract visuals from code only (though some take images or video and transform them).
the first group of arists that did this that i am aware of called themselves the "algorists" and they worked in the mid 70s. and before that there was manfred mohr.
i believe i am the first open source artist, having released generative art code under the GPL with open source as part of the explicit concept in 1992. if you know of anything earlier (or just anything really early) i would love to hear about it.
I've noticed that finding software isn't too much of a problem, but getting stuff like tilable images + materials or video seems quite tricky - how do you get round that, or do you just generate everything algorithmically / use electric sheep for it?
For such questions, Taboo the word things hinge on. Try asking and answering without using the word "art". I think you'll find it comes down to arguing about the definition of the word "art", which isn't very useful.
Of course, software and algorithms can be inspiring and fantastic. Who cares about arbitrary clarifications?
I particularly loved the C-Store (spawned Vertica) and H-Store (spawned VoltDB) papers. Clear ideas, demonstrated well. There's also a paper and code on using SIMD to implement fast integer decompression that I found pretty cool.
Or some of the code used in old games for performance, like stuff Carmack did. Heck, even learning a new programming style can be impressive.
I recall the distinct feeling of awe when I first understood the F# pipe operator:
let (|>) x f = f x
So simple, but requires partial application to work, and enables so much.
Or, since we're on this site, look into the Y Combinator. Getting that for the first time was a thrill!
Saying 'Can software be art?' is like asking if paint is art or clay. The issue with this question is you quickly end up lost in some metaphysical quagmire, there's a lot modern art has explored on this question, take modern greats such as Olafur Eliasson, or Ai Weiwei, or Rothko. Their work derives no greatness from the mediums they were made in but the ideas they form in our minds.
The 'rule of thumb' when it comes to deciding what is art and what is just design, is does it have a use? To borrow a quote from wikipedia on Duchamps 'Fountain':
"Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object"
"Art" is a concept that obviously has no one definition. For many people, art is synonymous with beauty. If they look at it and like it, it's art. I wasn't personally moved in this way by google maps or the iphone, but I understand that many people were. So I think the answer to the question posed in the post title for most people is "Yes, or close enough".
Another function that can define art, as opposed to aesthetic beauty, is causing people to see the world in a new way. Some of the greatest art take something familiar and causes people to see it in a new way, or takes common tools and uses them in a way that is somehow surprising or unexpected (ie, the Mona Lisa or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony). I have seen and been a part of software that delighted people. I've seen simple web utilities inexplicably bring smiles to peoples' faces and moments of joy into their lives. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to do that again, to recapture that glimpse of magic. And I probably won't even come close. If that isn't art, then I don't know what is.
Art can have many forms, it's a loosely defined term by intention. But good art does have a definition. Sometimes software and hardware can elevate to reach that height, but most of it does not. I wish I could think of more examples of artistic technology products, but nothing really jumps out at the moment. To quote the Supreme Court when answering a similar question, "I know it when I see it."
It's a little unclear whether the question being asked is, "are software creators artists?", versus, "can software be perceived as art by a user?" Seems like the OP's question is more in line of this second version.
We should probably refine the question further to: whether there's much out there capable of it at the moment, versus whether it's possible in principle. It's clearly possible in principle, if you concede that it's a medium that can express visual and auditory info with sufficient richness for the creation of art (and of course with a little imagination you can see visual/auditory modes are a small subset of what's possible in principle). As for what's out there at the moment, I'm confident saying my deepest experiences of artistic feeling have been in using software; and I hear similar echoed by others.
As far as 'what it is' as a human activity, my feeling is it's kinda like a magnet with one pole art and the other engineering/craft.
What you're talking about is great design, which leverages artistic ideas of proportionality (in multiple dimensions) to functional ends. Now, depending on how you do that it could have a significant aesthetic dimension for other professionals in the same field, but art whose aesthetic effect depends heavily on insider knowledge is severely limited. Contrast this functional approach with a piece of software like Journey from That Game Company; the technicalities are obscured and while it is visually complex, there's nothing to differentiate it technically from many other videogames on the same platform that display similar or greater visual complexity. What makes it aesthetically distinctive is the choice to de-emphasize or completely dispense with concepts such as a score or time pressure, such that it posits a very different theoretical economy from most other games, and thus yields a very different experience for the participant.
One of my favorite answers to this question comes from a federal lawsuit that ended with a ruling that source code is protected by the First Amendment. Here's an excerpt:
Programs written in source code also share many of the linguistic elements of texts written in natural languages, like German or French... For First Amendment purposes, the use of language is highly significant. Languages are made up of conventions, regular ways of expressing and communicating thoughts and ideas shared by a group of speakers...
Language can be technical, and even arcane, but that does not make it any less like language. A native speaker of English, untrained in medicine, might have difficulty understanding the discussion of a cancer patient's progress. The vocabulary is different even if the grammar is not. Musicians use artificial notation for writing and reading music. Mathematicians and scientists do the same to express concepts important in their fields, with grammar and other conventions that may be wholly incomprehensible to the uninitiated...
For every shared language, natural or artificial, however, there is a community of speakers and listeners (or readers) for whom the language is both comprehensible and for which the language is its conventional form of communication. To belong to a community is to speak its language...
If source code can be expressive, and it is, then it can be art. That doesn't mean that all code is art, of course -- I've written my share of single-use utilities that aren't -- but some subset does deserve that title.
Arguments about what exactly art "is" will probably never cease--but I'll still proffer a definition that helps with your question:
Art is something--a sort of significance--we experience, and not really something we make. When we say we're "making art", we're making an object or giving a performance that we hope will induce others to have the experience of art. In reality, "making art" is an interpretative process; art, like love, is an experience--not an object.
The point is that software most certainly induces people to have the art-experience, both intentionally and unintentionally. It's probably less common for source code to induce the art-experience (intentionally or not), but I suspect this too happens.
Yes, I do! I've long held this belief. Especially now when there are so many platforms, devices, toolsets, designs, and languages you can use. Coding has converged to an artistic medium in itself. One of the prevailing characteristics of an artistic medium is boundless permutations to express oneself. Think about letters and words on a page for a poem or paint colors and strokes on canvas. I wrote about this at length in this post awhile ago, which has a deliberately tongue-in-cheek title: https://medium.com/@eastbeast/i-am-an-artist-and-tech-is-my-...
Yes, of course. The term art is so broad that almost anything humans do can be art. The art of programming is, however, very esoteric and obscure so that your audience is very small. Few people care or are able to care about programming deeply enough so that it has an aesthetic value for them. I wouldn't be surprised if outsiders even regard it as something unpleasant as they are uneasy with the complexity, on he other hand they might, of course, consider interface design as art.
Suppose I write a cellular automaton in which after some complex dance all the white cells are turned dark. This could clearly be art.
Suppose that I write the software to implement this CA, but not display it, just jostle the memory locations. That is still art.
Suppose the rules are such that it is clear that all the on cells will be turned off, with some perhaps complex interactions in between. Then you don't need to run the code to see the art, just read the source.
I think any implementation of Towers of Hanoi is art.
> Suppose that I write the software to implement this CA, but not display it, just jostle the memory locations. That is still art.
I'm not entirely sure that's true. I get the feeling that art has to be perceived to be considered so, or otherwise we'd say that a painter thinking about a painting is art, even if he never actually paints it.
(note that I have no doubt that someone somewhere will attempt to do this as an art project, but then we'd have to discuss what "art" actually is)
All art has some degree of engineering and science behind it. Painters use light and chemistry, musicians use acoustics and materials science, and so on. Technology development is no different. I think what happens with us is that there is so much science and engineering that we forget that everything we create both says something about ourselves and has an emotional impact on another human somewhere.
Technology development is most definitely an art form.
Art exist to either teach us something or make us feel something. In that regard I think plenty of games could be considered art, not just because of the graphics. This war of mine (where you play a group of civilians caught in a war zone) makes you feel something and connect with humans in a very different way when you are done with it.
On the other hand most of the software we make is a much more engineering and craft.
Personally I believe anything you decide to call art is art.
I appreciate what you are saying with regards to brilliance, but experiences and emotional responses to software, code, products and anything else really don't necessitate art -- the act of declaring it art definitely does though.
IMO, art involves intention and conveys something. I do not know what to call what it conveys, but it comes from the artist. It is not accidental. So, a piece of software can be beautiful but not art. But software (e.g. games) can convey something and can be art.
Is a paintbrush art? I would say it's a tool that can be used to create art. Is everything made with a paintbrush art? No, not everything made with a paintbrush is art.
I think possibly both, though the two could appeal to different audiences. Of course the source code has to be revealed, if it is to be appreciated as art.
Seibel: "As a programmer, do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman?"
Norvig: "Well, I know when you compare the various titles of books and so on, I always thought the "craft" was the right answer. So I thought art was a little pretentious because the purpose of art is to be beautiful or to have an emotional contact or emotional impact, and I don't feel like that's anything that I try to do... I think craft is really the right word for it. You can make a chair, and it's good looking, but it's mostly functional--it's a chair."