What We Can Learn from Visual Artists About Software Development

Abstract This paper explores software’s role in visual art production by examining how artists use and develop software. We conducted interviews with professional artists who were collaborating with software developers, learning software development, and building and maintaining software. We found artists were motivated to learn software development for intellectual growth and access to technical communities. Artists valued efficient workflows through skilled manual execution and personal software development, but avoided high-level forms of software automation. Artists identified conflicts between their priorities and those of professional developers and computational art communities, which influenced how they used computational aesthetics in their work. These findings contribute to efforts in systems engineering research to integrate end-user programming and creativity support across software and physical media, suggesting opportunities for artists as collaborators. Artists’ experiences writing software can guide technical implementation of domain-specific representations, and their experiences in interdisciplinary production can aid inclusive community building around computational tools.

Published at CHI 2021 Access the PDF here.

Article I described how this work aligns with my vision for computational production that prioritizes letting artists use computation in their own way:  Building Software for Artists. This article was published in the UX Collective on May 9th, 2021 and has been read over 3.5k times.

Artists The following visual artists contributed their expertise and time which made this work possible:

Chris Coleman — http://digitalcoleman.com/

Emily Gobeille — http://zanyparade.com/

Eran Hilleli — https://eranhilleli.com/

Shantell Martin — https://shantellmartin.art/

Miwa Matreyek — http://www.semihemisphere.com/

Fish McGill — http://fishmcgill.com/

Molly Morin — https://www.instagram.com/mollycmorin/

Michael Salter — https://michaelasalter.com/

Mackenzie Schubert — http://mackenzieschubert.info/

Kim Smith — https://www.kimsmithart.com/

Ben Tritt — https://bentritt.com/

Nina Wishnok — https://www.ninawishnok.com/

Lynne Yun —http://www.lynneyun.com/