Artists Learn to Code [ 4 ] Temperance & The Devil
creative practice with coding as a part of that practice
Tutorial culture, which can feel widget-like, teaches discrete skills. Those skills aren’t necessarily dispensed from the foundation of a creative practice. This circumstance is a natural consequence of the media that delivers each tutorial. Digital skills demand a great deal of attention in order to improve as a technologist.
What does this mean to the practicing artist?
Printmaker and painter Arthur Thrall created images using musical notation and the sinuous lines of calligraphy. Technically ~ his etchings were that of a master printer.
Later in his career he created series’ of paintings around a hopscotch motif. I can’t find a good reproduction of one from the particular series I really love, Earth Moon Hopscotch but I did find this engaging one, Water Hopscotch.
Painting, aka moving pigment around on a piece of fabric using a stick with animal hair on one end. The pigments are in some sort of that will stay in one place. And then I think about my 2006 MacBook Pro and how much better it works than my 2012 model. What is ‘progress’, to the artist? Did Thrall “move backwards” when he shifted to the looser gestures and simpler technologies of painting? Are we seizing on specific technologies and investing in those certainties (skills), because we think they contain more meaning?
In Processing we learn to code through tutorial examples. The artist takes a mooc, works through a bunch of Daniel Schiffman’s exercises. . . And then what? Where does the creating start, how does the new collection of skills get linked to creating art?
In what follows, I’m using a couple of pieces from a series of synaesthetic videos I made for a suite of contemporary classical piano pieces to demo a creative practice with coding which was part of that process.
1. Find / create / discover a project
You know your inspirations, the things that you value and care about and need to make art about. That’s yours to figure out.
I love classical music. I am a classically trained violinist who left a conservatory of music after two years. It is an amazing and beautiful language. I’m also intrigued by the icons of the Tarot Major Arcana. They suggest so many stories, and often plug into unnerving parts of life, ideas we would rather avoid.
When my friend Christian Kriegeskotte started publishing recordings of twenty-two piano portraits of the Major Arcana of the 17th century Tarot of Marseille, I was inspired. I share with Christian the love of abstraction. He had already abstracted the images to sound. What might happen if I ‘drew’ semi-static geometries which referred back to the visuals of the Tarot cards, and connect the audio from the recordings?
I made The Fool video as a creative proposition when Christian first posted it, as a teaser, to his Soundcloud account. Christian generously agreed to allow me to use the recordings of his work, performed by Eric Clark.
I challenged myself to create one video per day. I completed the cycle in 21 days, in 2015.
2. Set up parameters
I decided to use the Marseilles deck as visual inspiration; this was Christian’s starting point, after all. I also google-searched each Tarot arcana, and considered the iconography of many designs together. What common threads could inspire geometries?
Those cups. The icon centers on the angel pouring water between two cups.
3. Work in a sketchbook
We don’t often see images of sketchbook practice online. It’s a way of thinking outside of the pressures of the coding environment.
The more I can keep the work on paper, the easier the coding becomes. The fewer thoughts I’m trying to keep sorted in my head, the less obstructed the big picture of the work. Jotting down questions gives me prompts for testing other looks for the piece.
Now I start to get closer to the code. Elements of the sketch are fixed on the coordinate plane, like they are fixed in the image on the card. There will be movement on this 1280 x 720 playing field. Working out each elements’ location, knowing I’m going to be plugging a particle system in between the two arcs labelled ‘red’ and ‘blue’ ...
Now coding for pieces, and discovering another spot for animation to happen — the cups themselves.
4. Code it.
Test it. Discover stuff. Like, Oh my computer totally locks up when everything animates in one sketch. Troubleshooting, I split tasks between two sketches. The cups are animated in one pass, the particles, another. The final look provided by blendMode(DILATE), and simple compositing in a pro video application.
The next day, it was Le Diable [ Key XV ].
The Devil’s so loaded with cultural power, so many images. Simplify, simplify. Red, white, black, horns.
Not all of the lines animate at the same rate, or in the same way. Working it out on paper helped a great deal. Playing with blend mode again (DILATE) helped keep the consistency of the watercolor look. Inverting the sketch and doing multiple takes allowed me to composite together a video sufficient to the length of the piano composition.
5. Loop : Find / create / discover your project
I do better and more work when I’m not processing out my everyday ideas, frustrations and joys on social media. If you’re stuck for ideas, try holding back. Find a silent collection-space for affinities, allergies, strangeness. Blow off the cynicism that seems to seep from online spaces, ignore the claims of know it alls. Even me, lol. None of us know all the stuff, if any human did would we be in the cultural predicaments we’re in now?
This work was super engaging for me to create because it plugs into my constellation of ‘strange attractors’ — ideas and concepts I return to again and again. You know what those ideas and places are for you. Go there, spend time there, make work in those zones. Fold coding into the process. See what happens.
