I am not even sure I know how to get ideas out of my head anymore.

Which is why I have decided to blog my thoughts and responses to the various issues appearing throughout my studies on the DMU MA in Creative Writing and New Media program that I am currently studying in an ever more dedicated way (does that sound positive or what?!)

One of the points of discussion was the idea of opening up the code behind digital artwork (of whatever form) in an artistic way, thus showing the viewer how the piece works… almost like opening up a Swiss watch and showing the innards. I am not sure whether I am entirely comfortable with this idea of showing the guts of a piece, possibly because I was brought up around my grandmother’s tapestries where the flip side, although scrupulously neat, was always carefully hidden by a frame and a wall.

I understand that there are people in the world who like viewing the method, logic and workings of a piece, at least as much or more than the “surface”. In business, I am one of these people – I like to know how things work. I cannot really access art (in the painted sense) in terms of layers due to my eyesight, but in both English and Music, I am equally happy just letting a piece work as I am understanding the hows and whys etc, or viewing the score microscopically. This possibly just means that I am now able to turn off my inner analyser in a slightly healthier way!

It stands to reason that there would be more absorbers of art online who are interested in the layers and seeing how things work. These are tnot just he coders, the computer builders… but also the people who are in the porcess of learning how EVERYTHING works and have not yet learnt to distinguish what does not need to be discerned in this way. Everyone is looking deeper. There are areas of escapist pop culture emerging on the web, but in a world where anyone can do, everyone still wants to know how.

Understanding the layers and code of art then becomes interesting, not just to those of an academic bent. Turning pieces over or inside out is not a new way of looking at art – it is just a way of making digital art more tactile. It is looking at the brushstrokes, rather than the pristine surface.

I picture art gallery pieces online with a roll-over to show the underside/code. People would analyse this critically in the same way as agitated brushstrokes are psychologically purused by experts now. Code can, no doubt, be beautiful to the right type of mind. It can also be sloppy, it can be crisp, it can be elegant… it can tell us almost as much as ordinary language about the coder. Are they a scavenger? Are they obsessive? Are they lazy? Are they unskilled or using a pre-existing programme to generate the art?

I can see the opening up of code as an analytical mining exercise for high brow thinkers. I can see the physical strings of code as beautiful objects in their own right, when placed within a piece of art or poem or whatever. I can see code as a language of communication between certain groups of people, not like a natural language, but rather a designed language like the language of a subculture, with all that entails psychologically. One day, maybe code will be as free form and artless as the natural world I am watching streak by as I travel at high speed through the country side along the Great Western Railway – a working reminder of the dawn of the industrial age. At the moment, it still seems contrived and self-conscious. This current thinking may be starting this process of natural code-based expression, or it may be focussing too much on the code, rather than let it creep quietly into our consciousness artistically, as it has done so far.

There is also the issue of how it almost ceases to be when not in active use. A painting continues even when noone is looking at it. When code is dormant, it is not performing as designed. Is it then more like the ballarina’s costume or the musical instrument? Only art when it is functioning/performing in the presence of a person?

Code is just a collection of letters and symbols like a painting is a collection of pigments and chemicals. Really, these things only become art when they pass through our minds. Something in us makes them art when we interpret them. Maybe it is our reaction to things that makes them art – code being by function interactive and dependent on our interpretation, makes itself art.

Maybe art is simply a puzzle we can’t solve – something we constantly fund more in to grasp and more questions in to ask. Code does this as well. Not just computer codes, but DNA and other complexities in life that we are constantly trying to render in symbolic form. Some sculpture, some paint, some write, some code… we are all trying to render the same things in symbollic form…