Computational Thinking & Toolmaking:
Entanglements and Fissures within Artistic Practice
“The tool is — what can the tool do, what are the boundaries there, and what can I do with that? What is it made for and what else can it do? That’s the main question.” — Sylvain Vriens
Many technological corporations today want to convince consumers that their tools lead to more ‘efficient’ results and ‘objective’ solutions, but tools have never been bounded entities separate from the political and social sphere. As Mark van Koningsveld states, “people use tools as ways to extend their body, their mind, their thinking, and their ways of connecting to the world,” and they have done so since early stone tools. New technologies do not only create new possibilities for society, but also for artists. Although digital technologies have boundaries, those boundaries can also often be stretched and experimented with. The creative coders part of Creative Coding Utrecht’s HELLO WORLD! exhibition all contributed to give their perspectives on how they relate to digital tools and platforms as artistic material, and how they enter in conversation with it throughout their artistic practice. As part of our the exhibition, we conducted studio interviews with the artists, which will be quoted below. Sylvain Vriens’ quote above strikes me because it illustrates the ways in which the (digital) tool itself is explored within creative coding, and how this exploration often leads to novel ways of understanding toolmaking in the first place.
Carolien Teunisse and Bram Snijders are part of DEFRAME, a collective of visual artists. Carolien Teunisse explains that her guiding question within her art practice is “What else is possible then what we usually think is possible, with these tools?” This way of approaching the digital material allows creative coders to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying structure and logic of the technology that they work with. Bram Snijders expands on this, stating that within this exploration lies a certain tension: “You listen to it. You listen to specific characteristics; but you are also forced into this form which you want to sculpt. So, it’s a material which can inspire you.” This artistic and research-based approach to digital technologies leads artists to gain an intimate understanding of how these tools affect the social world — from how Tinder algorithms categorize and score people, to how Google Street View dislocates our understanding of space and time.
Prototyping is an important part of experimentation and play when it comes to creative coding projects. Artists will often make many different versions or test runs before committing to a particular vision of their work, and for some artists such as Sylvain Vriens, the work will always remain one iteration in an infinite series of alterations. Frederik Vanhoutte, for example, echoes this sentiment: “An interesting aspect of generative art is that every finished piece (…) leaves a trail of prototypes, variations, test versions, all of them accessible, some of them revisited at a later time and spinning off in totally different directions. It often happens that a new piece has its origin in debug art, code written to visualize potential errors in a process, utility code becoming the seed of new work.” Indeed, many of the works are products of various test runs, proofs of concepts, or even glitches and mistakes. Jasper van Loenen also recalls that his work was initially the result of a test run with Pix2Pix, using a random set of 6,000 images.
Mark van Koningsveld compares creative coding to bookkeeping: “you hack together all your tools; and you get it working so that the front works and it looks good, and it gets people using it. After you have seen the initial working, then you start to make the real object and you start to really make quality code.” Before that, Mark is prototyping and using different pieces of code that come from open source communities. Explaining his coding process, Frederik Vanhoutte additionally states that although ‘each operation in itself is a simple step’, the ‘repetitive application across different scales leads to increasing complexity’.
The artwork emerges not just from the output of the code that artists construct, but also from the artistic interventions and translations that they make throughout the process. These interventions and translations are often crucial to refine the aesthetics of the piece or to make their concepts ‘machine readable’, for example. Sylvain Vriens explains his process of arriving to the final artwork as ‘massaging’ all the pixels and details into the right image or sound that is aesthetically pleasing. Ruben van de Ven often works with corporate systems and has a slightly different approach; rather than ‘massaging’ the glitches and leaking data sets into place, he investigates these from a distance to deduce its workings. Throughout the artistic process, there seems to be a tension between randomness and control — between creating rules and engaging with systems, and creating space for serendipity and tinkering.
In making their works, Creative Coders are often seeking to reveal the ‘gap’ between what digital technologies state they do — offer us a more efficient and rational view of the world — and what they really do — offer us a distorted perception of reality from the point of view of particular algorithms, with their own agendas and biases. In Hokjebots (2018) — a piece in which several Tinder bots with different personalities and image recognition criteria ‘match’ with profiles that fall into certain categories ; such as the ‘rich guy standing next to a car’, or ‘girls wearing sunglasses or bikinis’— Mark van Koningsveld asks: “How does it feel when you are put in these boxes, when they are wrong, because [the algorithm] saw it wrong? (…) You can be put in categories by the algorithm that you may look like you belong to, but you do not actually belong to. (…) You can tick all the boxes but you can still be a very different person than the one that the algorithm thinks.” In his work, he highlights this gap by researching Tinder’s covert scoring system and making users aware of how they are being categorized by the algorithms and each other.
Increasingly, the corporate world is attempting to close this gap through marketing; comparing the Amazon Echo to the best household assistant and making our computer interfaces ‘smoother’. In doing so, they are attempting to hide all the flaws, glitches, and apparently bulky hardware that goes into this technology. As Olia Lialina states, the design of the computer has been made increasingly technologically ‘invisible’: “Any sign of the computer working hard is unbearable. Mechanical noise is especially despised as it reminds us of mechanical parts. Everybody knows that the computer operates with nothing, with ‘ones and zeros’. The noise distracts from this ideal picture” (Lialina and Espenschied, 2009: 53). Creative Coding practices counter this increasing trend: opening up old and new technologies to uncover their inner workings. The artists in this exhibition have created work which is the outcome of their artistic research into different applications and software: from the navigation device, to Tinder.
Saskia Freeke highlights the importance of playing and being creative with technology in her years-long art project Daily Things, in which she programs generative design work every day. She explains that “we are now more ‘using’ technology (…) You use your technology to do all your tasks, to phone someone or send an email, you always have it with you, but you don’t often play with it or see what you can make yourself. If people start programming themselves more, it would be interesting to see what they can make themselves, rather than just use.” She states that the most important part of her artistic practice is playing both with the rules she writes as a coder, but also ‘the rules I tell myself’.
Creative coding holds a different meaning for each practitioner, but the main drive of the creative coders exhibited here today is to make the audience question the way they use, and are used by, technology. Computational thinking, therefore, does not necessarily represent a rigorous and static way of being in the world, but rather presents a way of questioning and experimenting with what we encounter every day. Through their artistic practice, these artists have not only approached digital tools and platforms as material for their work, but have also aimed to deconstruct them and intervene within them, expanding our notion of ‘toolmaking’.
