DevArt: Art made with code | Hacker News Reader

DevArt: Art made with code

devart.withgoogle.com

77 pointspetercooper22 comments

No mention of demoscene on the entire site, very disappointing. For some OG dev art, do head to pouet: http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?order=thumbup

also make sure to play kkrieger from http://www.theproduct.de/

d/l: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036

also check out ryg's blog: http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/category/demoscene/

Looked that up and came across:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assembly2004-areena01.jpg

What a difference 10 years makes.

For context, here's a photo from last year's Assembly: http://assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/Assembly+Summer+2013/Aleks...

Yeah it's unfortunate they didn't mention the demoscene but if we're talking "OG", there's a history of media artists creating "dev art" that goes back to the same time if not further.

E.g. Videoplace (~early 1970s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo

also:

http://scene.org/

http://www.bitfellas.org/outreach.php

http://www.capped.tv/

http://www.demoscene.tv/

> No mention of demoscene on the entire site,

Hey, the demo scene existed way before "making art with code" became an expression owned by the young hipsters who think they invented everything, so no wonder they don't even consider it exists.

My initial reaction was similar. There are some fine pieces on the website; but then why the fuck is raspberry pi listed as a platform, along with iOS, Linux and Windows? Why is Arduino there? If someone decides to do something on a MegaAVR, is that going to get there in addition to Arduino?

I honestly appreciate the initiative, but I find the presentation to be very disrespectful about the code part of it.

Hehe, they indeed seem to dissociate Hardware/OS based on irrelevant criteria.

Here's some computer generated art from the 50s:

http://translab.burundi.sk/code/vzx/index.htm

This actually took long enough to load (25 seconds?) that at first I wondered if the loading animation was the referred-to art.

The actual art is interesting, but ouch.

"DevArt is a new type of art", "DevArt is the opportunity to open their creative process, share their art with the world and be a part of a new movement in art."

Why are they pretending to have invented this? Net art (or whatever you want to call it) has been a thing since the 90s, Rhizome has plenty of early examples (http://rhizome.org/artbase/)

If we count ascii art it goes back further than that.

Display hacks are one of the oldest forms of code. TMRC was hacking them together even before the PDP-1.

A (fairly poor) study I did last year on code as art lives here: http://faegernis.com/

I would like to get back to it sometime, but my knowledge of aesthestics is limited.

I can't wait until code is no longer seen as this mechanical and mysterious thing. Stuff like this will no longer need to be explicitly be "Art with Code", instead it can just be "Art made by describing it"

Since demoscene is mostly happening in Europe, and hardly existent in America and the far east, I can see why they wanted to give it a different name. They don't even know what demoscene is.

Seems kinda dumb to name your project after possibly the biggest art community in the world: http://deviantart.com.

I really love code as art. I do a bit during my free time, but it's a dream to do it full-time.

Does anyone know how to break into this field?

I guess it's a bit like doing regular art full-time. Get yourself a name, a mystique, an agent, a benefactor. Skill is one thing, but success requires marketing.

(that said there's a number people who manage to do a regular bill-paying job and pursue an artistic endeavour on the side - eg Andy Lomas works at the Foundry by day and then does cool CUDA-powered music videos by night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qMvqeEUzzw . I think it helps to try to at least work in a creative or visual industry though.)

Thanks for the reply. Any other suggestions on artists to watch?

At first I thought "What ever happened to calling it a demo?", but these go beyond that. Some clever public API (ab)uses to be found.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com