Art and code

One of my themes for this year is combining art and code. I’ve tried this in the past and found that I enjoy it, so I’d like to do more. I’m not expecting to be any good at it, but that’s not why I’m doing it.

My usual programming work, and some of my ideas and pet projects are business-y, or about marketing someone else’s products. Occasionally they’re about data. I’m not involved in the design stage of any of these (apart from the pet projects), so they can all feel dry after a while (no offence meant to my clients; it’s not you, it’s me). The things that got me excited about computing in the first place were art, music, games and to a lesser degree, science-related stuff. I think the first code I wrote, around age 11, was in BASIC on a BBC Micro Model B, using a toolkit my maths teacher created that allowed us to easily draw pictures with code. I remember coding up a house because it was made of the simple primatives provided by the toolkit - rectangles, triagles… maybe a circle for the sun.

A recent episode of the JavaScript Jabber podcast featured Jenn Schiffer talking about mixing art and code. She has a range of experience in this area: using art to lure people to code, and using code to explore ideas in and make art. She has some fine projects. My favorite is “Vart”, an irregular blog detailing her attempts to recreate the works of her favorite artists using JavaScript in some way.

A little context

This post does not express anywhere close to full disclosure. I have friends who actively make and promote digital art or music, and more concrete experience of my own than I’m letting on here. Looking over Jenn Schiffer’s work has reminded me of my younger self and my inspirations. She’s given me a sense of glee about the chance to recover some of that youthful enthusiasm, and I wanted to capture some of that sense of wonder in a blog post.