d i g i t a lf i r e

It's a common sentiment. Faced with the - so obvious! - logicality of machines, many assume that there is no room for art within. In these pages, perhaps, that assumption can finally be laid to rest. Perhaps it may give some insights into the psyche of the faces behind the endless flood of semi-cogent input we see everyday.

Art in silicon? What nonsense, some might say. There is no room for the broad shades of subjectivity within the limits of ones and zeroes and hard cold reality - or is there?

I think there is. Paper and pencil, brush and paint and ink, have a certain tactility to them that sets them apart from the medium which the computer scientist - nay, artist - works with, to be sure. Human language is old and computer languages are young, and the one has been much more blest with riches of vocabulary than the other, but is that a reason to make a distinction? One might as well say that film noir is inferior to colour film. The point, very simply put, is that art doth lie in the intent of the artist, and beauty in the eye of the beholder - if I may borrow the cliche.

The unschooled person looks at a piece of abstract art and sees only the diseased imaginings of a maniac. The critic looks at the same piece and sees - what? Perhaps the same thing. Perhaps, however, he sees the intent of the creator within, the intensity imprinted through brush and paint onto the canvas. The layman looks at a section of computer code and sees incomprehensible words, strange signs beyond his ken, and concludes that there is no beauty in it. The programmer - perhaps - might see the same thing - or he might understand the creator's design, the beauty of the constructs and algorithms, the art of function displayed in form.

Of course, both critic and programmer could be wrong. The creator in either case might have had no artistic intent whatsoever - but how does one judge? Who can judge? Not I. What I can say is that this is possible. Ethereal fairy castles can be woven out of electrons as well as pigment. Silicon can - indeed - be a canvas.