Paper #2 - [DIS 2014] Crafting Code at the Demo-scene

This paper [1] was more high-level than the previous, concerned with looking at the practice of coding as craftsmanship, making special reference to the way sociologist Richard Sennett approaches the subject [2] as a broader definition that can cover not just manual labour, but the work of programmers, doctors, artists, and so on; craftsmanship as skill not merely in making things by hand, but as artistry in a particular craft no matter the medium. The paper looks at the demo-scene, wherein coders use their skills to create audiovisual art, and accesses the idea of coding as craft by explicating how the act and practice of coding plays into the ideas of craft engagement, craftsmanship rhythm, and craftsman expressivity.

What drew me to this paper, and why its content interests me, is the fact that I have been following a number of creative individuals for a year or more now who fit this descriptor of the coder as craftsman, who are skilled coders that use code as an expressive tool, as an artistic medium in and of itself. The contribution of this paper, while building on previous work such as Sennett's, is doubtless important. The broad field of modern art still struggles with the idea of digital objects created with code as art (for example, critics and publications are always grappling with the idea of games as art, often in profoundly wrong-headed ways that try to insist that games be closer to films, or art installations, or what have you), but I find the work of these individuals just as compelling as more traditional forms, and this paper supports a sense I've been getting about how they work and the new ways in which I'm beginning to look at coding as a result.

One of my favourites is Katie Rose Pipkin, an artist who started out in fine art but has since moved into creating twitter bots, data art, and other web-based digital artifacts. While her work is often reliant on generative methods and randomness, there is an undeniable personality to it all, and concern with certain recurrent pieces of imagery or subject material - hallmarks of well-crafted art.

catalpa
certella arfottia pic.twitter.com/2bfpWpI9J6

— moth generator (@mothgenerator) February 19, 2016

(an example of Katie's moth generator twitter bot, a collaboration with Loren Schmidt)

(a video diary of Katie's initial explorations in maxmsp, showing the intersection of coding, hardware, craftsmanship, practice, and artistic expression. Note the personification of the digital, of the programmatic - this is a very Katie thing)

See also this talk she gave at Pecha Kucha Austin, wherein she begins by linking fine art illustration to the idea of information storage.

The paper also made me think of game designer Brendon Chung, who designs independently under the banner of Blendo Games. In designing his upcoming game Quadrilateral Cowboy, he's taken to live-streaming and recording his process. Look at any recent video on his YouTube channel, and you get a sense of him as a craftsman expressing himself artistically, albeit through C++, Blender, and the Dark Radiant engine. All the elements talked about in the paper are there: engagement, rhythm, and expressivity.

[1] Nicolai Brodersen Hansen, Rikke Toft Nørgård, and Kim Halskov. 2014. Crafting code at the demo-scene. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 35-38. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598510.2598526

[2] Sennett, R. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008