Minimal Codes as Minimal Art
Article at the boundary between computer science and art
When a few months ago I started to brush up my coding skills, it wasn’t long before I realized how little I could remember from the years back at the University. A little bit of C++ here, a pinch of Fortran 90 there, well, that’s it. From what I said, you have already guessed my background in Physics.
I needed to improve my skills in sight of a career in Data Science and I went looking for a language that could give me access to a range of topics, from Web Scraping to Machine Learning, from Natural Language Processing to parallelization. Of course, I went for Python.
During the first week of my training I started to revise the basics through a Codecademy tutorial. My mind is constantly in need of new ideas to challenge itself with, and I got pretty soon tired of the project available on the platform. I barely knew how to chain a for and a while loop, but I already aimed to work on my own stuff. I just wasn’t sure where to start.

Both in life as well as in art, I have always been fascinated my the idea of Minimalism. As Leo Babauta explains it, Minimalism:
It’s a way to escape the excesses of the world around us — the excesses of consumerism, material possessions, clutter, having too much to do, too much debt, too many distractions, too much noise. But too little meaning. Minimalism is a way of eschewing the non-essential in order to focus on what’s truly important, what gives our lives meaning, what gives us joy and value.
Inspired by the works of Piet Mondrian and some cheesy quotes found around the internet, I started to produce simple codes that served no purpose except for the naïve need of having some fun. Once I had enough material, I created my first GitHub repository.
Some of the codes will you to enter a number and will comment on the size of it: “Wow! Such a huge number!” or “Uhm, why so tiny?” Some other will demonstrate their indecision upon the geometry of the world. Is it round or flat? The image below might explain more.
Later on I thought that if I want to define a new discipline on the boundary between computer logics and art, I need first of all to establish the basic rules. What I came up with is the following, copy-pasted from the repo:
All codes in this directory are conceived as executable art installations.
A Code, to be considered Python-Minimal, shall:
1) Rely on a maximum of 45 lines.
2) Avoid any practical usage.
3) Facilitate existential awakening/confuse the user.
Well, I hope that the readers that made it up to here won’t take any of what I said too seriously. Deep inside, this is a Minimal Article. It has no point. All I meant when I wrote it, really, was to practice on a couple of things, and have some fun.
