Coding in Art and Design: From Democratization to Mainstream

Tarr, Kálmán (2024) Coding in Art and Design: From Democratization to Mainstream. In: P/References of Design. Cumulus conference proceedings series, 1 . Cumulus Association, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, Budapest, pp. 685-691. ISBN 978-952-7549-02-5

Text 47a5faae-15f1-4be9-9de6-ff90f4b85203 - Published Version Download (12MB)

Abstract

In the "Stage of Impossibilities" project, I created a puppet moving mechanism for children with multiple disabilities. In this structure, the marionette is not manually controlled but can be moved by a robotic arm through tracking head movements. This technology has been used in a special needs school in Budapest as part of movement therapy and art classes. A working prototype has been created in a few days using Arduino and visual programming languages. In my artistic research, I am exploring my role, primarily how a person with a background in arts education can take on a creative role in areas traditionally associated with engineering, particularly the creation of prototypes that require programming skills. The project led me to explore the origins of the tools I use, the ambition behind their creation, and their validity in today's world. A key element of my research is the study of development environments that have been created to democratize programming and make it accessible to artists and designers. John Maeda's "Design by Numbers" project and its continuation with Processing and Arduino significantly contributed to making programming-based art an integral part of the cultural discourse, and many development environments - used in interactive and visual artworks - derive from them. These are certain types of development environments that I call the "build your-own-tool" software. They approach the relationship between humans and machines from a different perspective. The "build-your-own-tool" software allows artists to create complex digital works without having deep programming skills. It was the pioneers of computer art who gave directions for making this software, while they couldn't rely on anything similar and had to write the algorithms themselves. The "build-your-own-tool" software gives the illusion that we create every part of the creative process ourselves, but at the same time, we are bound by the characteristics of the software itself. With these development environments, it is possible to make rapid progress, and they provide insight into the operation of the computer, but only a mediated and thus superficial knowledge. The recognition of the boundaries recalls the Manifesto of Computer Art written by the Hungarian computer artist Tamás Waliczky in 1989, in which he stated, "Programmers develop software for us, the users, to use. Unless we know the capacities of the computer, we cannot sufficiently formulate our needs. Unless we sufficiently formulate our needs, we will receive nothing but traditional replies, programs that mimic the usual logic." How relevant is the manifesto in today's era when computers have become intricately more sophisticated? In my opinion, we have drifted from this statement just as much as computers have become more complex. In this context, even greater significance can be attributed to the Arduino and microcontrollers when creating programming-based art or design, as their complexity is comparable to that of early computers, and understanding them is much more approachable.

Actions (login required)

Edit Item