What code or output is art worthy?

Question

I am wondering what code or even output of a program people would consider as art.

Are there any examples of a program artefact that should/could belong in an art gallery for the public or for programmers, or where one could say it was beautifully designed and/or produced something beautiful?

Answer 1

I don't think code in general could be considered art, at least by the general population. However, code can produce output that is definitely art. For example, fractal-based imagery.

Answer 2

I guess the obvious output would be Fractals? Or, output from photoshop ;)

I'm not sure code would be appreciated in an art gallery!

Answer 3

The demoscene combines code and art. take a look at debris and elevated, this is both extremely difficult to code as well great pieces of art.

The international obfuscated c contests are also fun pieces of code to read through.

Answer 4

Perhaps anything written in the Piet programming language, a Turing-complete esoteric language where the source code is an image file. Here's a version of Hello World and rather more attractive Hello World.

Here's a program that approximate pi - interestingly, it becomes more accurate if you make the image larger.

The language was named after the painter Piet Mondrian. Here's a program designed to look like one of his actual paintings (prints "Piet").

Here is the listing of several sample Piet code from the Piet programming site.

Answer 5

What code should go in an art gallery? code that inspires you for it's good design, ease of use, and simplicity.

Answer 6

To me, no code is art. Code is always at least ugly, but mostly really ugly.

Art and beauty is in algorithm, design (even if rarely, but because of the "artists"), the concepts than stand behind the code, but definitely not the code.

I don't think anyone ever say "oh what a beautiful way to copy an array to a list", but lots of us noticed how simple an logical algorithms like Dijkstra Algorithm, or beauty of a really well designed DB.

And yes code can make psychedelics images too, using fractals, gaussians stuff, etc. But it's was code produce, not the code itself.

Answer 7

I'm not sure that it should, any more than a car or building should.

Art galleries are art for art's sake. They're important, but ultimately their function is recursive.

Code is functional - it has an inherent elegance, especially when it does its job well. It serves its purpose when its output is used.

Answer 8

Art is in the eye of the beholder, for me:

• Whenever I find a piece of code that inspires me I get the same feeling that I do from other kind of art
• Code that is written for no specific purpose other than to push limits and provoke common beliefs (see demo scene on C64 from the 80:s and later)
• Code that put a lot of efforts to achieve something a "hard" or "impossible" way just because it can be done while another much more "easier" solution is available

There are a lot more but you get the idea...

Answer 9

To me, code is the paint brush and paints, but not the work of art itself. You can use your paint brush and paints to be extremely creative. Most of the time we can be creative with the way we use our tools but generally we produce things that can not be classed as art.

There are, however, those that can produce awesome art with code. Even make a living from it. Check out Flight-404 or Erik Natzke for example

Answer 10

A virus' source code (biennale.py) was presented at Venice's biennale as a piece of art.

http://0100101110101101.org/home/biennale%5Fpy/index.html

IMHO 'art' is subjective. I could consider art the Linux kernel, someone else may consider art perl poetry or obfuscated code, some weird people could consider Michelangelo's works as art :-P

Answer 11

My late friend Steve Metsker once wrote about the idea of "museum-worthy" code, code that was so elegant or intrinsically "good" that it should be put in a museum for others to appreciate, admire, and learn from. He imagined and aspired to writing something that would go in such a museum, and that someday some teacher would be guiding her class of children through and saying, "now here we see the code Steve Metsker wrote to ...". You can read more about Steve at this page.

I think the recent book "Beautiful Code" was written in this spirit.

Answer 12

Stuff like this Morse Code representation converter in C belong in (some kind of) museums, for sure. There's also a Perl entry in there that's similarly mindblowing. :-)

Algorithm-wise, I just re-met the Knuth shuffle (aka. the Fisher-Yates shuffle) which amazed me with its simplicity and efficiency.

Answer 13

I think Quines are really a piece of art. A Quines is a program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Here is an example in C# (not from me):

class c{static void Main(){s+=(char)34;System.Console.Write(s+s+';'+'}');}static string s="class c{static void Main(){s+=(char)34;System.Console.Write(s+s+';'+'}');}static string s=";}

Example taken from C# Quines