by Kyle Chayka
Artists are notoriously secretive about their processes.
Rothko never revealed the complex formulas behind his diaphanous color fields.
Picasso gave his famous dictum, “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal,” which may have been why
Brancusi was so loathe to
let the Cubist into his studio.
But what about when sharing becomes a fundamental part of the artistic
practice? For new media artists, whose work embraces the latest
innovations in computing technology and digital imaging,
being transparent with their working process is a fundamental part of
being a member of the creative community — everyone copies and adapts
from each other, sharing strategies, tools, and techniques.
Rather than locking their studio doors, media artists are in a
constant, open dialogue over how, and how best, to make use of the
technologies that drive their work. It’s not just about making use of
pre-existing platforms, but inventing new ones. Groups of media artists
are constantly developing original software tools that are made free to
use and adapt, under the same
open source banner that drives the well-known Linux operating system, among countless other projects.
Though these open-source creative tools were developed by artists,
they don’t need to be considered works of art in and of themselves. They
are, however, allowing more and more artists to begin working with code
to make art. The most widely used examples of artist-directed custom
software development are
Processing and
OpenFrameworks,
two open-source creative programming environments created to be
accessible for computer-shy artists and experienced coders alike. The
platforms have been integral to projects ranging from
Marius Watz’s
generative graphics to
James George’s
depth-sensing Kinect videos.
The difference between a media artist creating a tool like
OpenFrameworks and a painter developing a new admixture of oil paint,
for example, is that the coding tools are designed to be functional and
public, a provocative quality in the traditionally covetous art-world
context. “It’s the difference between something that represents and
something that operates,” said
Golan Levin, a media artist and director of Carnegie Mellon’s
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, in a recent conversation with
ARTINFO.
“When people do this propositional tool-making, even if there’s only
two or three people who ever use it, it actually works — it’s part of
its rhetorical force.” Levin teaches OpenFrameworks and Processing to
visual art students in a now-mandatory class in Carnegie Mellon’s art
program called Electronic Media Studio Two.
Creative programming environments are functional by necessity,
especially with utilities like Processing and OpenFrameworks. “The
moment they get widely used, you have to think about issues of
functionality more than you have to think about provocation,” Levin
continued. But this openness hasn’t always been the hallmark of creative
software development.
In 1998,
John Maeda, the director and founder of the MIT Media Lab’s
Aesthetics and Computation Group, developed a programming environment called
Design by Numbers. Created for “anyone who likes to
pick up a pencil and doodle,”
the private environment was intentionally minimal, a 100-by-100-pixel
square that only displayed greyscale, its output determined by simple
commands. It was a “level zero teaching tool,” remembers Levin, who was a
student of Maeda’s. Two other students,
Casey Reas and
Ben Fry,
decided that Design by Numbers didn’t go far enough — they wanted a
bigger digital canvas, and full color. They developed Processing, which
was made public in 2001.
OpenFrameworks also came in reaction to Maeda’s work. While working at Parsons, artist
Zach Lieberman
wanted to teach Maeda’s environment and his ACU code library to
students but couldn’t because the earlier system wasn’t open source.
Lieberman worked with his student
Theo Watson and developer
Arturo Castro
(the only contributor with a background in computer science, rather
than art) to create OpenFrameworks, which was released in 2005. The
platform continues to evolve with the work of a core group of artists
and developers, and is constantly being added to with new plugins and
capabilities by the OpenFrameworks community.
When asked if he minded that businesses were using his software to create commercial projects, Lieberman
told The Creators Project,
“My theory is that putting better tools out there means that people can
make better projects and then companies and institutions will see those
projects and take more risks, and in that way everybody’s work will be
able to improve. There’s just more opportunity.” The radical sharing of
the open community source has helped companies and artists alike — and
sometimes both at the same time.
Developer and artist
Jonathan Vingiano, along with Internet artist
Ryder Ripps, are the founders of
OKFocus, a creative agency that has produced a slew of provocative Web-based projects in the last year, including
Art or Not and
Tug of Store.
They also periodically release the Javascript plugins and tools that
they develop in order to execute their work, and have even made their
entire Web site design public. “What we’ve done is open source our
aesthetic,” Vingiano explained. “We use a lot of open source tools. It’s
the nature of being a part of this community,” he continued. “The
second that you use something that’s free, you’re part of it, and it
makes sense to give back to it.”
For OpenFrameworks and Processing, having a large number of
contributing developers and users — more cooks in the kitchen — is a
good thing, but the downside is that it can get messy.
Cinder, a C++ library for creative coding, is led by a single developer,
Andrew Bell.
It’s still open source, but it was designed for a more professional,
expert group of users familiar with the strictures of software
engineering. In the right hands, it’s a powerful tool, but it doesn’t
provide the same educational experience that makes Processing and
OpenFrameworks accessible to larger audiences.
Rather than as artworks or tools, it might be best to think of these
software platforms in terms of the community of creators and users that
they bring together. Artists develop new methods for working and share
them, connecting with and enabling their audiences. The audience, or the
user base, then takes the new software and runs with it, moving it in
directions its architects may have never considered. It’s an open model
for innovation and creativity that challenges many of the traditional
values of the entrenched art world, emphasizing transparency over
opacity and interconnection over secrecy. Isn't it about time we moved
beyond the closed-door policy?
