What coding projects are used to create art and beauty?

Answer 1

There's a ton of art projects involving technology / code over at processing.org

Answer 2

I've tinkered with http://processing.org here and there over the last few years. Along similar lines, there's the Context Free project, at http://www.contextfreeart.org

The idea behind Context Free is very cool. Rather than directly placing graphic elements, using imperative semantics, you define a grammar that declaratively defines the relationship of graphic elements. The runtime system generates an image by walking the grammar and instantiating elements that conform with its rules.

Fun stuff.

Answer 3

Every code project you work on should be a form of art, and wonderful to behold.

I am only being partly facetious here. Part of why people enjoy computer programming is the sculptural/artistic nature of the whole thing. Code for beauty of structure and appearance, and you often also have better code...

Answer 4

Any place where you will find contemporary art, so museums and art festivals. Interactive installations often use a dataflow programming language such as max/msp or puredata to process input and do something interesting with it.

There are also festivals which focus more on how code can be used to create art. An example is http://piksel.no in Bergen, Norway. Piksel.no has seminars and workshops, live events, etc.. There are similar festivals in other countries.

And you could stretch the definition of art a bit and include the demoscene. I do consider some demoscene productions to be art, but they are rare gems among the drudge. Still, have a look at http://scene.org/awards.php to get some idea of what kind of stuff that community comes up with.