INTRODUCTION
LITERATURE: Poetry, Science Fiction, Scripts, & Philosophy PERFORMING ARTS: Dance PERFORMING ARTS: Music & Theatre VISUAL ARTS (plastic): Drawing, Painting, Graphics, Cartoons, Sculpture, & Installations VISUAL ARTS (dynamic): Animation, Film/Video, Games, Computer Graphics, Holography, 3D Imagery, & Robots
INTRODUCTIONContemporary definitions of art, like the creative process that spawns it, defy rigidity. Whatever the definition art, today, connotes the application of skill to express ideas that impact ones aesthetic sensibilities. Computer programming embeds such expression within a framework of logic that is the hallmark of science and engineering.The boundaries between science and art are blurred by a transformative process that sweeps logic and empirical discovery into the realm of the perceptual. A masterful mathematician's derivation of an elegant transform that slays a mountain of organized rubble to resurrect it as a simple concise representation, evokes aesthetic appeal. The intuition honed from developing technical mastery somehow finds the right logic. Perhaps it is the capacity to create art that demarcates the level of skill: [a]fter a certain level of technological skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetic plasticity and form. The greater scientists are artists as well.[1] Central to the hacker ethos is the notion that code should be beautiful. The hacker artists featured here may have found the science of art and the art of science,[2] to be indistinguishable. Through a kind of osmosis peculiar to the artist, they engage their creative faculties in other modalities of artistic expression, and are more likely to code in accord with the aesthetic value system that differentiates them. These artists include those whose inventions - as precursors to actual expressions in a programming language - are deemed appropriate applications of ingenuity.[3] This is a growing list of hacker artists I have managed to find on the web. I have listed them according to art category. I have excluded photography and most forms of literature, since these can be difficult to evaluate. Adrienne Thompson 2009-10-08 |