I'm getting a bit worried about this 'art vs programming' discussion. It
seems to me that Geert's references to Rhizome threads, and Marc's
discussion of art as a 'space for exploration' are missing the point. We are
focussing on the value of art. What we should ask is whether programming is
'useless', indeed whether it really exists as a separate category of human
activity any more.
Consider the facts. Most of the programmers I know are poor drudges, who
spend their lives feeding computers, just as their ancestors fed machines in
woollen mills and car factories. In the name of progress, or profitability,
they continually devise 'new' means of making a computer do 'new' things.
Pasty faced and with tired eyes, they pour out of their sweatshops into the
bars of the Coolsingel or Clerkenwell, usually late at night, to hold
esoteric discussions about design patterns and abstracted methods, in the
belief that they are being 'creative' or 'innovative'. That's the only time
they feel fully 'alive': it's a tragedy worth the pen of Engels.
And just what are these 'new' things? Just as there are supposed to be 7
different story plots, there are perhaps 7 different computer applications.
Everything else is a variant of these. (Just as you might say that all
modern art is either minimalist, conceptual, etc.) Most programming is
derivative and consists of reinventing the wheel. (Look at the number of
rival applications in any field where Microsoft hasn't enforced market
dominance. Is there any real creative difference between Opera, Firefox, or
Safari, for example?)
Look at the techniques this urban proletariat uses. Just as artists will
endlessly discuss the true nature of primary or complementary colours, so
programmers hotly debate the relative merits of Ruby, PHP, Perl, Java, etc.
(All the ones I know agree that Microsoft's equivalents are c**p.) They
argue about PC vs Mac, or Linux, as if it makes a difference. The fact is
that code is getting easier to write: frameworks (such as Rails or Code
Igniter) or packages such as Dreamweaver make it much simpler to write
chunks of code - at the same time as they standardise those chunks and
further limit the possibilities of originality. (See Walter Benjamin's
essay, "On the mechanical reproducibility of code classes".)
In my view all programmers should be sent on a fine arts degree course, and
obliged to wake up every morning and ask themselves just what it is they are
doing and why. Then, instead of grudging respect from their friends and
family ("Ooh, a computer programmer! You must be brainy!") they should be
embarrassed, on their rare visits home, to show their aunties what they are
currently working at. ("I don't like that sort of thing, dearie, not in my
house. I don't care if it is a life study, I just think it's dirty.") They'd
soon give it up, and get a decent job.
Marc says: "In the end coding or programming is a skill and what matters is
what you use it for, this can potentially work towards defining its purpose
and
relevance...", but I think he's wrong. Programming is what we all do
nowadays.
Ever tried to make your mobile phone work? Think of all those instructions:
all that inbuilt functionality you either don't know about or couldn't get
to work if you did. Just like Windows XP.
It's only so-called 'programmers' who claim to be doing something
ontologically different, something 'special'. How long before one of them
simply signs one of those Japanese toilets that flush themselves, and tries
to pass it off as a 'work of programming'?
David Upton
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