STRIVING FOR IMPERFECTION IN THE DIGITAL SPACE
BY MIKE FUTCHER / YOGYOG.ORG

A ROUGH OUTLINE:

The dissertation essentially talks about computer programming as an art form.

Computer programming is a form of maths. The mathematical perfection of the digital space can be either used or deliberately worked against. This perfection can feel emotionally sterile.

Code-based artworks generally inspire a kind of aesthetic wonder. Coding art often has a simplicity to it, but crudity of both image and code may be more expressive and artistic. Programming is a labour-intensive medium and so the artist's personality must impregnate his code.

Mathematics connects to everything: philosophy, science, art. It started off being worshipped as an idol. (Singh, 1997) With this as our medium we surely can evoke more than the appreciation of technical skill, beauty and the puzzle of how the rules work. We currently demand more of an artwork that just prettiness. We could learn how to use and recognise symbolism within the code itself. Video Games create emotions of frustration, success, and adrenaline, and we can learn from them.

MATHEMATICAL PERFECTION:

One thing I remember from A Level Maths is that a measurement of length, area, volume, weight etc, can be any value, any conceivable infinite string of decimal places, but the chance of this measurement being any individual value is zero. An object may appear to be four inches long, but on closer inspection will turn out to be 3.9996435634 inches, and that is only to ten decimal places. This is the nature of the physical, analogue world.

Measurements within a digital world, however, are whatever we set them to be. A line within a digitally created space will be infinitely straight, or a perfect arc or other curve, in a way that no line traced along the edge of a ruler can ever be. Even if that ruler is straight out of the mould, the mould will have been worn down by the number of times rulers have been cast from it. However when we see this perfect, computer generated line projected into our physical world it is by way of computer printout or screen formed of a multitude of minuscule points, and the line is imperfect again. Only within the computer, or the mind of the mathematician, is the line perfectly straight. For this reason calculations are done by means of numerical manipulation rather than visually. Numbers are separated subtly from the real world, inhabiting a world of absolute logic and proof. When one of Plato's solids, the tetrahedron, the cube, the dodecahedron, is in a digitally generated three dimensional space, it is a perfect solid in a way no craftsman operating in the physical space could ever carve. Worlds within computers are built within the mathematical world of pure number.

The philosophical concepts of zero, one, infinity and perfection are expressed very literally within mathematics, and it is this definition of perfection that I use.

MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLISM WITHIN CODE:

Computer interfaces are awash with signs: icons, the bonuses in computer games, but these symbols are not within the code. Mathematics has a host of connotations of its own.

We may remind ourselves of perfect perspective with Durer's troubling masterpiece Melencolia. The sun's rays are lines of perspective and, seemingly, the scene is lit by the moon which is established as the principal vanishing point. All other lines except verticals and parallels to the horizon have their own individual vanishing points, governed by their particular angle to the plane of the picture. The vanishing point for the nearest face of the curiously truncated tetrahedron on the left is a long way out to the left of the picture. The shape reminds one of the Renaissance artist's concern for Platonic shapes. The sullen figure recalls how the melancholy temperament was considered a mark of creative genius ... it depicts the thinker so despondent he cannot use the tools of science and carpentry. The magic square in the top right corner of the engraving was thought by Renaissance astrologers to be a charm against melancholy. Such a square is 'magic' because each row, each column, and each diagonal add up to the same number, here thirty-four. (Holt, 34)

The digital universe is built of number, or rather of mathematical rules, with variables. Similarly the universe within this drawing is created through number, or at least geometry, with, as it seems to us now, unnecessarily complex perspective. The numbers that are drawn on the magic square, used in the picture's measurements, and used symbolically are all static. The complex symmetry of the magic square and the truncated tetrahedron evoke nothing of the yet-to-come or just past. Such mathematical symbolism must surely be possible within a digital artwork, but here it should be dynamic.

While the code is always hidden the rules of the program have to be sensed in some way. The computer-game player may not be aware of all the rules of the gameworld, but by playing he will learn the logic of the place. What sort of mathematical symbolism is suitable to the digital world?

Asteroids (1979) uses a triangle that moves when you thrust in a universe without friction so it keeps moving along the same line until you thrust again. It exists in a 2D space bent so that leaving at the top you re-enter at the bottom. It makes reference in its code to Newton's theory of motion and Einstein's theory of curved space, but at odds to science, laser beams float slowly (compared to the speed of light) across the screen. "Video games have almost always displayed lasers in this way... But it's wrong... lasers are made of light... [and] will take about a millionth of a second to hit home" (Poole, 2000 p 59) Despite the vacuum of space with no air to carry sound, the explosions are heard in most versions of the game. This game has been made so many times that, like Tetrus, Space Invaders and many others, it can be called a traditional computer game. Rather than melancholia, here the mathematics is used to evoke a dynamic science fiction, full of the cinematic and computer-game clichés and inaccuracies of the genre. It was clearly a conscious decision to put the more scientific rules of momentum and warped space in the game, and it may have taught the concept of curved space to a generation.

My own creation, Hollowlegs, a construction within Sodaplay. www.sodaplay.com

Using a similar scientific symbolism is Sodaplay, (www.sodaplay.com) that creates space where you can build machines out of lines that are incapable of bending but springy in length, connected at their ends to other lines flexibility. You then make some of the lines 'muscles': lines that, as well as being springy, expand and contract according to a sine wave. The lines are capable of moving through each other, and the whole thing functions on a 2D plane. Having created these abstract geometric automations you are able to drag them around the screen by the junctions, which are also affected by Gravity and Friction (both settable). This is not a simulation of anything in the real world but geometry with invented mathematical formulae inspired by the mathematical equations of physics. It is a new world with its own physics, created by programmers.

DIGITAL SPACES:

Any video game, any package, any situation in which you interact with a computer, can be seen as a digital space. Digital worlds within computers are built within the mathematical world of pure number. Every version of the world of number, no matter who or what is making the calculations, is identical, not because data is shared between these, but because all the rules are believed to be absolutely true. This is the reason a program that creates an image will create the same image no matter what computer runs it. A mathematical rule must be proved true by mathematical proof. A scientific rule must be proven by testing. (This is explained very well by Singh, 1997, p102) Computer programming is the art of inventing rules.

The decisions that the computer makes are based on symbolic logic developed by George Boole, a British mathematician, and published as the Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847 (Buick et al, 1995, p 56)

Mathematics and numbers are the building blocks of the digital space. To learn to manipulate this material (number), we would do well to look at other media and disciplines that have used it. Science is written in the language of mathematics, most scientific breakthroughs getting distilled into a few mathematical formulae, and the study of mathematics gives us ways to manipulate these formulae. While computers are currently used throughout all these processes, computer programming is not, necessarily, a science. If we see the domain of number as a separate world, then while mathematics scientifically explores this world, computer programming allows us to build in it.

AESTHETIC RULE FOLLOWING:

There is a whole host of computer programs that create the visually pleasing out of simple rules. Some create moving images, some interactive images. Examples can be found on www.asthana.co.uk, www.uncontrol.com, www.detrxo.org, www.kazsh.com. While the geometry of such designs often extends beyond the simple lines and circles I discussed earlier, it is still, by its rule-following nature, perfect. It is impossible for most of us to tell, purely by looking at these, whether they came out of experimentation in the name of art, maths, science, computer programming, graphical design, or other disciplines.

Most of my ideas are based on observations in nature, from the fluttering of a butterfly wing to the mechanical motion of a pogo stick's coil. (Tan, 2002, www.uncontrol.com)

Interactive Image by Asthana on www.asthana.co.uk

Interactive Images on www.dextro.org

Image by Manny Tan on www.uncontrol.org, using Flash, in interaction with myself.

While depicting the world by means of mathematical rules seems to be science rather than art, this is figurative science. It does not attempt to copy, just to depict.

Such aesthetic formulae are nothing new. "...the numerous art and technology exhibitions which took place between 1966-1972... focused on the aesthetic applications of technological apparatus" (Shanken, 1998a) I have found similar experiments on the cover disks of Acorn User, and any book on computer programming will contain some such beautiful codes. On the Internet, these aesthetic formulae have been sucked into the broad category of web art.

Mandelbrot set image created by myself, Photoshop & KPT5

If there are artworks within the mathematical world then one is the Mandalbrot Set. Its complex spiralling coils, not a perfect fractal but subtly altered on every level, are both aesthetically pleasing and mentally stimulating. Like a painting it draws you in and intrigues you. As we cannot directly sense the world of number we can only see this artwork in reproduction; either as a still image, or a film where it is coloured and cropped by the images creator, or on a computer program that allows you to zoom in on areas and colour the fractal yourself.

By the 1980s a home computer could handle arithmetic precise enough to make colourful pictures of the set, and hobbyists quickly found that exploring these pictures at ever-greater magnification gave a vivid sense of expanding scale. If the set were thought of as a planet-sized object, a personal computer could show the whole object, or features the size of cities, or the size of buildings, or the size of rooms, or the size of books, or the size of letters, or the size of bacteria, or the size of atoms. The people who looked at such pictures saw that all the scales had similar patterns, yet every scale was different. And all these microscopic landscapes were generated by the same few lines of computer code. (Gleick 1987, p 231)

Part of the charm of the Mandalbrot Set is the fact that it all came from a few lines of computer code. There are a myriad of programs that also create beauty out of mathematics: some with and some without interaction of some kind from a viewer. Paintings and sculptures may be beautifully simple, not that art, in any medium, is purely aesthetic, and the property of simplicity-complexity stemming from the following of rules is not completely unique to the digital medium. There are physical parallels to pendulum drawing machines, Spirograph, kaleidoscopes, the Slinky. But rather than using rules of nature to create art, digital artists can invent such rules themselves.

While Chaos Theory states that even a simple rule repeated over and over again can produce unpredictable and, to a certain extent, not perfectly self-repeating results, the most popular visual demonstrations of Chaos Theory almost invariably have a perfection to their curves, their symmetry.

A program may loop around a line "CIRCLE X position, Y position, Size" and draw a number of circles that form patterns based on a mathematical formula for changing the co-ordinates and size of the circle, based on, amongst other things, the mouse's x and y coordinates. It may use random numbers but this will introduce exactly the same disruption throughout, as a dice will always roll 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. If the mouse is used then the 'player' of the artwork will want to see some connection between what happens on screen and his* movements of the mouse.

* I use "he" and "she" at random, as "he/she" is very, very ugly.

Cox et al, (2000) argue that, "Like poetry, the aesthetic value of code lies in its execution, not simply its written form. However, to appreciate generative code fully we need to 'sense' the code." Even to those who know how to program, "understanding someone else's code is very much like listening to poetry in a foreign language" (Cox et al, 2000). We must be able to appreciate these works without entirely deconstructing their programming. On the Internet we experience one important aspect of the code - its size, where small is beautiful, and means a short downloading wait.

ARTWORK : INSTALLATION : LUKE JERRUM : TIDE

Tide, Luke Jerrum, photo illustration from cover of leaflet describing artwork.

At the top of a few stair-cases of warn, post-industrial brickwork and floorboards that is Nottingham's Future Peace Centre we come to a large room containing three globes on tripods and two pieces of scientific equipment. We are told that water is pumped in and out of the three spheres based on a gravity-sensing device that will witness the tiny changes in gravity that control the tides. The levels of water in the three spheres are raised and lowered ...

... so they resonate, like singing wineglasses, creating different frequencies as the water levels rise and fall ... The singing spheres evoke the changing relationship between the moon and earth. It is a true representation of the physical relationship: a highly precise measuring device, configured to register the gravitational force of the moon, sends data that is then converted into a signal to alter the water levels within the spheres. (Peter Ride, Artistic Director, DA2, 2002 Leaflet describing the artwork)

I expected this to be linked to some computerised calendar that would predict the position of the moon and sun, but instead it is linked to a highly accurate device for measuring gravity. It senses the real moon, not just a mathematical simulation of its movements. This way it is theoretically influenced by the entire universe, the gravity of every planet, every star, not just those that are programmed into the calendar.

I wanted to make a work that was physically located within a gallery but was however, far larger than the space itself. (Luke Jerram, 2002, creator of Tide)

It brings the entire universe within the gallery walls as an internet connection brings the Internet so vast within the 6"x12"x12" square of your computer

UNDO, PERFECTION, CRUDITY AND THE FLASH CARTOON:

The complete alterability of "drawing" programs leads to a kind of perfection. The drawing program I have most experience of using is Flash, but this category also includes Adobe Illustrator, AutoCAD and many others. 3D construction programs work on a similar method. They allow you to move and alter lines after you create them, and to "undo". Also Lock functions mean that if you move the end of a line close to a corner or a join of lines it is magnetically attached to it. The lines are perfectly straight or perfect curves, and perfectly copying part of the image is a piece of cake. Autocad also allows you to create shapes by typing in their co-ordinates on a command line and Flash allows you to reposition shapes in a similar way. Flash even allows you to draw a line free-hand, and then smooth it, straighten it or simplify it, but this doesn't actually increase the perfection, as the computer will almost defiantly have a different idea of how the line should be.

The "undo" function that now appears in all computer applications (by applications I mean programs where the user of the program is being creative in come way: writing text, creating images, etc.) allows you to pan backward and forward through the alterations you made to the thing that you are creating. Multiple lives in video games mean that after death you are merely set back on your quest, and have to do that section of game again. In the digital space, time is reversible. Lives are different to Undo.

The German film Run Lola Run explores the way narrative can work in a video game: First Lola is set the task: find 100,000 Marks and deliver it to your boyfriend, Manny in twenty minutes. Then the film is split into three, each starting with Lola running down the stairs out of her flat in cartoon form. On the first attempt she ends up getting shot, and on the second attempt Manny is run over by an ambulance, but after these deaths she starts again from the top of her stairs. Every action is still important, the drama is still there, but failure is just another chance. It is, after all, a game. If it were an application, Lola could scan backwards through her actions one by one, rather than start afresh. Multiple Lives add to gameplay in a way an undo function wouldn't, whereas an application where you could only go back to predetermined points would be irritating.

I don't believe that such devices as Undo remove the hand of the artist. It's still there, endlessly positioning each point exactly where he wants it. Neither do I think it is lost if the artist is typing code to create an image, rather than drawing it himself. "Code is intricately crafted, and expressed in multitudinous and idiosyncratic ways." (Cox et al 2000) So when you use an application, as well as your own, the hand of the application's programmer is in there, or rather programmers, as a modern application, or game, is built by a vast team in which individualism is lost, and style is copied. The Flash Cartoon is a medium in itself, and every work is a collaboration with Flash's code, which is owned by Macromedia (r). Anything you create in Sodaplay is collaboration between you and the programs creators.

Though all this leads to a kind of perfection, the mouse, the input device which we would normally use to simulate drawing or constructing in digital space, is a very crude instrument. When you are using a computer to create an image, unlike when drawing, or for that matter using virtually any non-digital medium, you're not looking at the hand that creates the mark. Using it you watch a symbolic representation of your hand's movements. As it rolls across a surface it collects dust on its rollers, and the symbol of the mouse on the screen relates less and less to your hand's actual movements, until you deem the mouse needs cleaning. This imperfection embodies the difference between the physical and digital worlds: any dust in the digital world, though it may be there, would have to be added deliberately. When we start working in three dimensions this physical handle into the digital world becomes even worse: it still only operates in two dimensions. There are other input devices: there are pens and pads that do not suffer from dust, but still stop you from watching the hand that is making the mark, and once we drew with digital joysticks or curser keys that would only move our virtual mark-maker vertically, horizontally or at a 45 degree diagonal.

These drawing programs partly led to the contemporary cartoony geometric style of graphic design, animation and comics. This style combines the complex language of the cartoon* with geometry, particularly the circle.

* The whizz-line, a line leading to a moving object that shows where it's been. Second, broken outlines around the edges of the characters to depict slower, more uneven movement. An objects presence, or for that matter its absence, uses a parody of the classic principle of using lines of perspective to point to a figure standing on top of the vanishing point: A little halo of lines with the sole purpose of pointing towards an object - or a space in which an object should be. Speech Bubbles in all their different styles. Hopefully this gives you some idea of the enormity of the comic-strip language.

Image by Francois Chalet

There is also a particular style of Flash Cartoon that is deliberately crude. As well as the programming art that is described in Generation Flash (Manovich, 2002) and the section of this essay Aesthetic Programming, Flash also allows you to create an animation faster than any other tool. This is a crude use of a tool designed around perfect geometric shapes and lines; along with visual and audio sampling, and, for that matter, images drawn on paper by the artist. It seems appropriate for bad taste humour www.joecartoon.com, political cartoon, www.drparsons.fsnet.co.uk. Crudeness expresses anger, discontent, and crap drawing is inherently funny. We no longer believe that an artwork that was made fast is inferior to one made over a long time.

By www.drparsons.fsnet.co.uk

From The File That Would Not Leave by www.0100101110101101.org and Needle's Eye

South Park started life as a cut out animation, one with real cutouts made of physical paper, which was circulated on the Internet. When it became a TV programme its cutouts were generated in simulated three dimensional space with specialised code to make the movements look unsmooth, irregular. The code deliberately simulates low quality cutout animation.

There is one more important difference between computer and physical, pen and paper, drawing. Whereas blank paper is white, a blank screen, the most common way to view digital artworks in motion, is black. Line drawing's methods of depiction are entirely based (with a few exceptions) on being a black line on white paper, and the screen works the opposite way. Despite this modern computers are designed to show us text on a white screen, which hurts our eyes far more than a light-on-dark display would.

THE VIRUS AND OTHER LIVING PROGRAMS:

Viruses make the digital realm impure, imperfect, not entirely controlled by you. These malevolent, self-replicating eaters of data and wasters of time and space may be needed so that we are not to blame for everything that goes wrong in the digital space. These beasts are alive, in that they re-produce. Perhaps viruses are the true inhabitants of the digital space, and we are wrong to try to eliminate them. There are viruses that do nothing but reproduce, taking up space, and ones that might display messages on certain days and for certain key events in the virus's life cycle, e.g. when they infect a new file; but would it be possible for a virus to be helpful? Or at least entertaining or attractive to the human user of the digital space? I remember a virus I once had on the Acorn 3010 that displayed a message when I ran a program it had infected that stated its presence and that it would do nothing but reproduce and give me these messages. It stopped a certain program from working and I got rid of it. I kind of miss it. How cruel was I to eliminate this digital life-form from its digital space, from the physical world, no less? We can be cruel gods to the digital world.

Perhaps it should be the role of the virus to create the equivalent of dirt in the mouse, but it seems a long time till viruses will make changes so subtle. Perhaps computer artists one day will farm viruses on their machines, selectively breeding them for particularly nice disruption of the perfect images that the artist's code would create without such simulated symbiotic relationships. Breeding, as we understand the word today, would require the viruses to evolve, to create inexact copies of themselves, but computers are already simulating evolution, on which Karl Sims comments, "It occurred to me that computers could simulate this process and we could get all of these complicated and interesting things without having to understand and assemble them." (see Holtzman 1997, p 86)

The Cyber-pet, is, in some ways, also a life-form within the digital world. The first, most famous of these, the Tamagochi, lived in a flat plastic egg with buttons that represent food, playing with, water, sleep, and the like. To keep it alive, you would have to press these buttons when it beeped. There is a version of the concept on the PC called Creatures, and while they are more advanced than their hand-held equivalent, and are capable of breeding, they are incapable of getting out of the cage which is the program they inhabit and running around the rest of the space in your computer. The Tamagochi was a more realistic pet simulation in one important way: it operated in real time. It would sleep through the night, and would demand food through the day, where as the beasts in Creatures only live while Creatures is being run, and are frozen between plays. To create something more like having a pet living in your computer, I propose we cross it with a virus, and link its ecology more to the working of the computer. Maybe this could take the form of a little creature of your desktop. (To be a pet it has to be visually appealing) You'd have to feed it scrap information by dragging files you wish to delete into its mouth, but if you starve it, it will start looking for food itself, and could eat anything. I don't know if anyone would want such a thing.

animal.pl, created by Alex McLean and exhibited at http://lurk.org, is "a self-contained piece of software that would publicise itself, get people involved in a process, and eventually expose its inner workings to the world." (From text claiming to be written by animal.pl, programmed by Alex McLean) In the world of exact copies and links that is the World Wide Web self- publicity and reproduction are different sides of a the same coin. To explain this, imagine a digital version of this essay, which is on a single floppy disk, is illustrated by links to where the artworks are on the web. The artworks would still illustrate the essay, but no manifestation of them beyond the URL, or internet address, would be included within the essay.

We exist in a three-dimensional physical world, which we perceive through two two-dimensional images, our eyes, and we almost invariably perceive the digital word through a two-dimensional image on a screen. We have designed most of the digital space to be seen that way, often impersonating three-dimensional space by the means of perspective, but from a virus's perspective, from inside the digital space, the digital space does not really have dimensions at all. A life-form inside the digital realm would have to find an entirely different way to perceive its surroundings. Would it even have surroundings, as distance doesn't really apply to a world of raw information? A computer's hard-drive is separated into files inside folders inside folders and the Internet is made of pages linked by association. Any computer file is a one-dimensional string of numbers.

CRUDE AND EMOTIONAL PROGRAMMING:

Aesthetic computer visuals are rarely challenging. They may entertain you, impress you with their cleverness, but they do not evoke mood, emotion or connotation. And they engage you only for a fraction of the time a game or, for that matter, a computer package would. The main argument against programming as art goes something like: (Czecaj, 2001)

But I don't believe, having sat, staring at his code for all the time it took him to create a program, the coder's passion, heart and humanity is not transferred to the code in the same way a musician's is transferred to her music. The Composotron VVX232 is Dr. Pending's art, any music it makes is merely a reproduction of the artwork. If the music it produces sounds soulless, then that is a fair criticism of the artwork.

Czecaj (2001) continues...

Is it possible to program in a less exacting, more haphazard way? Would it be possible to (maybe I should try this) enter lines of code with the wild abandon of Jackson Pollock's paint splashes? Probably not. But programmers can, like the rest of us, make mistakes they find appealing.

As a software developer (my day job) unpredictable behaviour usually means bugs, and gives me headaches, but as an artist I often prefer the unplanned results. In painting the medium can do things that I can't predict as well... (Napier, see Brogger, 2001)

I remember computer games crashing in fantastic ways, sometimes, in part, still moving. And out of the information of websites, Mark Napier has created similar images with two alternative web browsers: Shredder, www.potatoland.org/shredder shreds up websites, messing up and re-arraigning the images and texts all over the screen, while Riot, www.potaoland.org/riot mixes different web pages.

Riot by Mark Napier with myself browsing.

MY OWN ART:

Image from the game I'm constructing.

The computer artwork I'm creating could be loosely termed a game as the player's control is through a character. A small green creature called Leaf wanders around an enormous factory, disrupting the carefully arranged rooms that he walks through, so the game gradually changes over time. The game is full of fascinating errors. It seems strange that the player is told specifically what to do in a computer game world where you are the only being whose actions are not determined by a set of pre-programmed rules, so I give the player no such instructions. Despite lack of directed purpose the artwork still has the frustrations and addictiveness of a game. I'm using an outdated computer, which is a statement against the numbers of old computers that go to land-fill (for info on this go to www.lowtech.org), and the 'Luddite Tools' which allow you to disrupt the game impersonate both comic-strip language and a previous generation of computer. I've used a lot of devices that have very little to do with the real world. The curved space of Asteroids only affects butterflies, that fly chaotically*, creating mathematically beautiful patterns. Landing on a platform can change it into another type of platform, and leaping through a cogwheel rotates the room. Almost everything in the game has been created by myself, apart from the disruption the players cause, and reflects my own preoccupations and personality.

* Chaotic: based on a reasonably simple set of rules, and yet unpredictable. That's how I use the word here.

CONCLUSION:

In this essay I've looked at iconography, imperfection, aesthetics and the hand of the artist within the art medium of computer programming. All of these I believe to be possible, and may enhance coding art. The hand of the artist, however, must exist along side the hand of other artists who wrote the software that the artist uses. In the case of interactive works, the player, or witness of the work, also has a hand.