Hacker Art
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
INTRODUCTION
Contemporary 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
LITERATURE: Poetry, Science Fiction, Scripts,
& Philosophy
Professor, University of Stanford; Inventor of Lisp; Architect of the term "Artificial Intelligence"; Turing Award.
Science Fiction: The Robot and the Baby.
Former Chairman of the SGML SIGhyper.
Philosophy: Erik Naggum's Ideas and Principles.
FSF President; GNU Project founder; Father of the Free Software Movement; Inventor, original author, and principal developer of EMACS; Author of Elisp; Initial developer of the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and other GNU programs; Original and principal author of the GNU GPL; Copyleft pioneer: Grace Murray Hopper Award; Takeda Award; Other awards.
Poetry: Funny verse and song parodies ; Guantanamero; The Free Software Song.
Scripts: Cartoons.
Science Fiction: Jinnetic Engineering; The Right to Read.
Sun Fellow; Principal Investigator for design and development of Fortress; Co-author of Scheme; Designer of the key bindings for the original integrated EMACS command set; Author of Common Lisp: The Language; Co-author of the Java specification; Co-author of The Hacker's Dictionary/Jargon File; Grace Murray Hopper Award.
Poetry: Poems and song parodies; The Telnet Song.
PERFORMING ARTS: Dance
Developer of Zope and GNU Mailman.
Modern Dance: Contact Improvisation.
Inventor and original author of Python.
Modern Dance: Contact Improvisation.
FSF President; GNU Project founder; Father of the Free Software Movement; Inventor, original author, and principal developer of EMACS; Author of Elisp; Initial developer of the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and other GNU programs; Original and principal author of the GNU GPL; Copyleft pioneer: Grace Murray Hopper Award; Takeda Award; Other awards.
Folk Dance: International Folk Dance.
Sun Fellow; Principal Investigator for design and development of Fortress; Co-author of Scheme; Designer of the key bindings for the original integrated EMACS command set; Author of Common Lisp: The Language; Co-author of the Java specification; Co-author of The Hacker's Dictionary/Jargon File; Grace Murray Hopper Award.
Square Dance: Member of Tech Squares - MITModern Western Square Dance.
PERFORMING ARTS: Music & Theatre
Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, MIT; FSF Charter Board member; Bose Award; MacVicar Fellow; Other awards.
Music: Clarinet - Performances with the MIT Gilbert & Sullivan Players.
GNU Project maintainer, Texinfo developer.
Music: Piano (classical) - Recordings.
Founder of Ra-Software and Ra-Ajax.
Music: Guitar; Composition - Bluez.
Tex applications developer; GNU Regex POSIX compliance developer; Co-author of Tex for the Impatient and the GNU Font Utilities.
Music: Piano; Live art.
President, Viewpoints Research Institute; Adjunct Professor, UCLA; OOP pioneer; Inventor of Smalltalk; Turing Award; Other awards.
Music: Guitar - Professional musician(jazz, rock and roll); classical pipe organ, other keyboard instruments; composition.
Theatre: Theatrical set and lighting design; musical comedy writer and producer.
Professor, University of Stanford; Inventor and original author of TEX and Metafont; Author The Art of Computer Programming; Grace Murray Hopper Award; Turing Award; Other awards.
Music: Pipe organ - performances.
Database developer.
Music: Guitar (bass) - Pissant (band).
FSF President; GNU Project founder; Father of the Free Software Movement; Inventor, original author, and principal developer of EMACS; Author of Elisp; Initial developer of the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and other GNU programs; Original and principal author of the GNU GPL; Copyleft pioneer: Grace Murray Hopper Award; Takeda Award; Other awards.
Music: Recorder.
Sun Fellow; Principal Investigator for design and development of Fortress; Co-author of Scheme; Designer of the key bindings for the original integrated EMACS command set; Author of Common Lisp: The Language; Co-author of the Java specification; Co-author of The Hacker's Dictionary/Jargon File; Grace Murray Hopper Award.
Music: Voice - MIT Choral Society; Masterworks Chorale; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Boston Concert Opera.
Musical Theatre: Role of Lun Tha in The King and I; Title role in Li'l Abner.
Noise artist and database architect.
Music: Clavier, strings, percussion; Performance art; Composition - Recordings.
Assistant Professor and Researcher, EPITA/LRDE; Core maintainer of XEMACS; Gnus and BBDB, developer; Author of FiNK, FiXme, QCM, CurV, DoX, and other LaTeX packages.
Music: Guitar (jazz), voice - @-quartet (band).
Theatre: Actor/director in Tantalides and other productions.
VISUAL ARTS (plastic): Drawing, Painting, Graphics,
Cartoons, Sculpture, & Installations
Senior Interaction Designer, Red Hat, Inc.; Lead, Fedora Design Team; Moksha developer; Gnome Brand Guidelines developer; LinuxChix speaker.
Drawing & Painting: Gallery and goodies.
Graphics: SELinux News graphics and Wordpress theme; FreeIPA logo and mediawiki theme; Lguest logo.
Graphics programmer, Institute for Scientific Computation, Texas A&M University.
Drawing, Painting, & Graphics: Gallery, including the GNU/Linux mascot TUX.
Mathematical artist and digital designer, Bathsheba Sculpture LLC; Adjunct Professor (former), Pratt Institute; Winner of Intersculpt 2007.
Sculpture: Gallery - Hand-held geometry, metallic projections in symmetry, rendered mathematical chaos, crystalline emblems of nature and the universe, other goodies; Exhibited work in TV series Heroes, and Numbers; The Quin lamp, listed in Time Magazine's "The Design 100" for 2006.
Tex applications developer; GNU Regex POSIX compliance developer; Co-author of Tex for the Impatient and the GNU Font Utilities.
Drawing: Gallery - Abstract composition.
Installations: Gallery - Settings for Live Art.
Sculpture: Gallery - Metaphor in 3D.
President, Viewpoints Research Institute; Adjunct Professor, UCLA; OOP pioneer; Inventor of Smalltalk; Turing Award; Other awards.
Painting: Paints occasionally.
Developer of Zope and GNU Mailman.
Drawing & Painting: Design explorations.
Professor, University of Stanford, Consultant, Sun Microsystems
Graphics: Sun logo.
Professor, University of California, Berkeley; Co-author of the RISC processor concept; Member of the Bell Labs team that developed the CCD sensor, two members of which were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize for 2009; Author of the Scherk-Collins Sculpture Generator; IEEE Technical Achievement Award.
Sculpture: Gallery - Mathematical expressions and abstractions in 3D.
Sun Fellow; Principal Investigator for design and development of Fortress; Co-author of Scheme; Designer of the key bindings for the original integrated EMACS command set; Author of Common Lisp: The Language; Co-author of the Java specification; Co-author of The Hacker's Dictionary/Jargon File; Grace Murray Hopper Award.
Cartoons: Crunchly cartoon illustrations for The New Hacker's Dictionary.
Noise artist and database architect.
Painting & Graphics: Gallery - Mixed media and computer-generated work.
VISUAL ARTS (dynamic): Animation, Film/Video,
Games, Computer Graphics, Holography, 3D-Imagery, & Robots
Professor and Head of EECS, MIT; Computer vision pioneer; MIT Bose Award; Other awards.
3D Imagery: Virtual-reality, computer vision simulation of X-ray vision used in image-guided surgery.
Tex applications developer; GNU Regex POSIX compliance developer; Co-author of Tex for the Impatient and the GNU Font Utilities.
Film: Production design for Kiss Daddy Goodbye; Editing (Bar-Din Productions); Scriptwriting (Red Wind Productions).
Engineering Consultant, Beautiful Code BV;
Games: Darwin@Home - 3D virtual universe "Fluidiom", simulating evolution.
President, Viewpoints Research Institute; Adjunct Professor, UCLA; OOP pioneer; Inventor of Smalltalk; Turing Award; Other awards.
Graphics, animation: Invented first bit-map painting system, animations, and GUI while at Xerox PARC.
FSF President; GNU Project founder; Father of the Free Software Movement; Inventor, original author, and principal developer of EMACS; Author of Elisp; Initial developer of the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and other GNU programs; Original and principal author of the GNU GPL; Copyleft pioneer: Grace Murray Hopper Award; Takeda Award; Other awards.
Animation: Dancing text in EMACS <M-x animate-birthday-present> (file "animate.el").
Noise artist and database architect.
Video: Shff++.
NOTES:
1. Albert Einstein, See "Memorable Albert Einstein Quotes", ASL & Associates citing Durham Morning Herald, August 21, 1955; Einstein Archive 33-257.
2. Leonardo da Vinci, "Study the art of science and the science of art".
3. See The Jargon File "The Meaning of 'Hack' ".