I've coded pretty much since I was in elementary school, back in the '70s, when childhood made it seem that anything was possible.
My mom was a programmer. She once took home a "portable" computer from work -- a 43-pound IBM 5110 with maybe 16KB of memory. I taught myself BASIC on it. Seeing the computer interacting with me via my own program was love at first sight.
My first program calculated the area of a triangle. I moved up to programming English-to-German translating software on my TRS-80, then a music generating app on an IBM-3060 mainframe in high school.
I majored in applied math and went on to a long and fun career in software, working in AI, robotics, pen-based software, mobile apps, games, websites, social sites, e-commerce sites, medical systems, and more.
Then I went back to my roots, exploring, being creative, and got into creating tech magic tricks.
Over the past few years, I wrote a Schroedinger's Cat application that put actual qubits on an IBM quantum computer into superposition and used an Arduino to indicate whether the "cat" was alive or dead -- which you only knew for sure when you opened the box in which it lived in. I coded up entangled scarves that shared emotions between people via 2G, world-wide. I programmed a Raspberry Pi placed in a handmade mahogany box to "x-ray" my own natural science illustrations. And I made game-like learning experiences for science museums in the Pacific Northwest.
Now I'm creating generative art. I love shaping randomness, which feels like sculpting out of smoke. Algorithmic art is a joy: to make, view, and collect. My feeling is that code-based art should be playful, meaningful, and mysterious -- just like those first programs I wrote when I was a kid. But computer-based art should do even more. Generative artists have an obligation not just to create something cool, but also to pursue the same aesthetics that traditional-media artists pursue, giving all necessary consideration to line, tone, composition, depth, color, light and dark, perspective, form, balance, contrast, texture, and on and on.
When an artist working with code creates works with love and care, the results are fascinating, beautiful, and flooded with meaning. With generative art, as in childhood, I believe that anything is possible again.
