Artists Learn to Code [ 2 ] Commenting To Learn
Have you ever looked at Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon? Looking at a painting, we immediately see the whole. Good composition gives the eye lines to travel through the image as the viewer considers it. How does part relate to whole?
I mentioned painting in How To Bottle Lightning. Through the act, with physical gestures, with brush and liquid, an artist makes images, abstractions, or something in between. When we go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at Picasso’s painting, we see the whole image immediately. Five nude women as stained glass? Or in a nascent cubist mode? Two seem to wear masks?
We are so far beyond the moment of Picasso inventing that language that we have seen the consequences of his invention. From that painting in 1907 to cubism and all of those plastic weird ways of ‘seeing’ from his later career . . . We give little thought to Picasso’s labor, inventing. Instead, Les Demoiselles becomes a selfie moment, or, I hustle past it with a moment of recognition as I go to find the exhibition I came to the museum for.
Visiting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at Wikipedia, we can read about Picasso’s beefs with Matisse and other artists. We can consider what may have been influences for creating this painting. We can evaluate many reads of the work.
The wiki-list of art historical views of art objects provides us with very quick snapshots of how views are unique to different moments in time. The cultural conversation changes decade by decade; the wiki gives us an easily-accessed Dave Hickey perspective of art. How many lenses can we use to interpret this object? What particular moment do we select as the authoritative moment about this object?
This sense of completeness of history isn’t available in the museum installation. It shouldn’t be. We should be looking at the painting.
In the wiki of this painting of Picasso’s, we find discussion of his preliminary workflow. With deeper research — finding information not available on the internet — one discovers and considers the studies, sketches, smaller paintings he made in preparation for this larger work.
Museum exhibitions and art historical discussions reveal only the masterworks. They show the result, not the labor and inner understanding that led to that result.
Reading the collected interpretations of Les Demoiselles I don’t find my personal favorite, that Les Demoiselles represent the five senses, naked and interacting with the world. At this point you’re probably asking, when is she going to write about teaching coding? Ok, how about now.
All the words I’ve used thus far deliver meaning to you. Some artists become artists because the images or ideas they want to communicate can’t be shunted down into words for expression. Code itself, as a command language, tells computers to do things that other media cannot. Code can liberate the vision.
Turning idea into codeable work means making repeated translations. Picasso painted a series of smaller images — studies, bits and pieces — as he struggled to create the larger painting. The artist works back from the vision, and forward to it from where s/he is now. For filmmakers and animators, often storyboarding provides a thread connecting this moment to the finished work. For coders working with story-based ideas, tools like twine can help the translation process.
Parallel processes: artmaking means ongoing translation of idea to finished artwork. Coding means ongoing translation of idea from expressive language to command language. For artists learning to code, its getting a handle on that very specific act, coding. The more quickly the artist establishes working metaphors for the coding sketch and a working undestanding of what is going on in there, the easier it is to learn. If you know why a dropped semicolon means the art doesn’t work, there’s much less frustration with the process.
I encourage artists to explore the examples provided by a codebase and comment every line of code in a translation to plain english. Reading, interpreting, typing, each sensory approach to the act of coding helps us remember more about the grammar and syntax of a command language. Semicolon tells the computer “This task is done, move on to the next task.”
“But what about the math?” they say. “I hate math!” Well …
… Math can be understood as a command language for people who are using numbers. “2 + 2 = ” means “take the number two (from the left side) and the number two (from the right side) and add them together. The equal sign requests that you calculate a result.”
Calculation like this does and does not factor into coding with Processing. In the example above, we have to know that the impact of “x + 15” will be “whatever # is inside x gets 15 added to it on every loop through the draw, so, if x starts at 25, its values will become 40, 55, 70, 85 etc.”.
The math used in Processing remains as simple as the math tested in high school standardized tests. Numbers are a data type, are often used to map pixel locations. In the heavily-commented code example above, we see math operators like < repurposed to be used to evaluate what number is held by a variable, to ‘decide’ what to do next.
Commenting out code this way reveals the granular thought process driving the code. It reveals the layer of thinking we aim to use when working on our ideas away from the computer.
The process doesn’t go “Vision of finished work! Think and write in code to get to the result.” Instead it’s “Get towards vision of finished work”, then this middle ground of “I need this square to repeat across the field, what code will get me there?” and then the two lines given in the code above.
By taking time to isolate the activity of over-commenting the code, the artist removes cognitive load. Simplifying, thinking clearly, creating these notes, we making room for ourselves to understand each piece of the command language. There’s no problem-solving, no debugging, no overwhelm, trying to create something with an unmemorized, not-yet-known language resource. Instead it’s poking around in the sketch to figure out how the computer sees it.
All of this labor, the audience doesn’t care about it. The Museum of Modern Art shows only the finished painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Take the learning process lightly and at your own pace. There’s something to be said for working on paper, in a sketchbook, too, but I’ll save that for the next essay.
