Programming Art Without Formal Training
In the early 2000s I heard stories of what it had been like to go to RISD. The main thing I was told was that there were brutal criticisms or “crits”. Basically from what I could tell, you would be encouraged to do something and then destroyed with criticism by the other students and the professor. I don’t really understand this approach but some who have been through it, swear by it and say it’s what pushed them to be a special artist… or they abandoned ship.
I’ve also heard of folks going to art schools where there are professors that challenged students and found delight in seeing freshness and exploration. I’d probably prefer to go to one of those schools. Maybe RISD is one of those schools now?
I’m not really much for criticism unless necessary in coaching to improve the speed of a task or using criticism to set criteria for progress. My friend Eric and I created a club format that specifically outlawed criticism in our club meetings that you can find here: https://affirmative.club/
In general I’m not a big fan of formal training either. I dropped out of the7th grade and paradoxically became a middle school teacher later.
I taught puppetry in schools before getting a teachers certification and then because of my background in puppetry I taught art for many years. My passion in art teaching was fueled by creating new opportunities for students to explore who they are by expressing themselves in different mediums. Often times students would be surprised by their own talent that was unlocked just by indulging in a new way of expressing themselves in drawing, painting, or ceramics.
I’ve been wanting to do creative coding since forever. I grew up in the 1980s in a house full of programmers who were my heroes figuring out how to make games with color and sounds for the Apple II+ and the Commodore64.
I started to feature creative coders in my personal video blogs and Make: Magazine video blogs in the mid 2000s watching friends in Graffiti Research Labs and NYCResistor explore the frontier of trouble making, code, and art. Later in 2009–10 inspired by my friend Marius Watz I took his processing class. It was early for things like this, so early that the computer I brought to the class he taught mysteriously wouldn’t load the files to run the processing language.
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Now I’ve had a long history of working with talented developers to create code to make machines do wonderful things and I have an ambitious imagination and so I have some experience in thinking about the kinds of things that code can do, but still I’m not a coder.
I collect computer art/digital art/generative art. My team at Bantam Tools and I built plotters for the Harold Cohen show currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art. My team has excellent coders, but I’m not one of them.
But I still want to understand more and have some artistic coding agency. I’m generally a pretty good learner and I could probably point a finger at my attention span or my overloaded responsibilities, but it’s on my todo list to start digging in.
I’ve figured out a lot of ways of almost doing programming art. I’ve used ChatGPT to write some programs to output SVGS and I’ve trained AI models with my own drawing datasets in RunwayML and a friend helped me inject my art into stabile diffusion and then I’ve been able to make new drawings in my own style to explore ideas, but it’s still not code. (I hacked the astronauts above using my own dataset and AI tools)
I’m writing this post partially to keep myself accountable to my own dream to make some code that outputs SVGs that I find delightful enough to plot on one of our new Bantam Tools plotters that we are almost ready to ship.
I also do things better when I’m not doing things alone and writing about the process makes me feel less alone.
So here’s what I’m doing. Because I’m an fxhash addict, I’m learning p5js via Daniel Shiffman’s Coding Train Videos.
It’s funny, most of my life is set up to create infrastructures for creativity and I’ve made the machines and I’ve done all the research and background obsessiveness on plotting, I just haven’t done the actual coding work. I’m enjoying Golan Levin’s Drawing with Machines curriculum. I’ve read most everything he references in this course and it’s all good and I really like the assignments in this course so I’ll likely be jumping off inspired by some of the assignments here: https://github.com/golanlevin/DrawingWithMachines/tree/main
So my next challenge is figuring out how to do something delightful in p5js and getting a SVG file out of that program. If there is another person in the Hudson Valley that wants to start a study group hit me up with a DM on twitter. What got you over the hump into code proficiency?
