abstraction

The nearly 300 lines of code in Snibbe’s piece might overwhelm a viewer. Again the applet’s java is color-coded, but in this case, the colors mimic what one would expect to see in a good editor. This is the programmer’s view, color-coded according to the syntax of java itself. And

Mark Napier’s 3 Dots code is expansive; some 600 odd lines are spread over three files, and he uses several additional external libraries as well. Even more than Snibbe, Napier makes use of object-oriented strategies. With the Bitmap255 object he creates a visual system capable of drawing translucent lines. In SpringyObject he creates sub-classes for springs and masses that behave according to the laws of physics. An instance of the SpringyObject is a particular system of masses and springs whose elements, locations and velocities can be simulated over time. In the main body of code Napier sets up an instance of such a system (SpringyDots): one fixed mass and a group of 3 movable masses connected by three springs, of varying tension. The spring to the fixed mass is not made visible.

The front-end/back-end model taken as paradigmatic of digital art by CODEDOC is what is supposed to make the show’s reversal, its focus on the code, make sense. But CODEDOC’s presumptions are several: that digital art is visual; that digital art involves code; and, that its split is binary between a front and a back end.

In the space we awkwardly refer to as the digital (denoting perhaps an era, perhaps a technology, a mode of production, a means of communication or recording, a virtual world or the mechanisms enabling its imagining, production etc.), a collision has occurred, confusing and destabilizing the trajectories of two previously distinct disciplines–two out of the many discourse networks treating abstraction: art and computer science.

The trajectory of computer science moves in the direction of greater and greater self-consciousness about the practice of modeling to the point where it can deploy a term like "second-order cybernetics" (or "applied epistemology") referring to a modeling practice which takes into account the effects of model making on the system which is being modeled itself. Following from Wiener's lack of distinctions among human and machine elements, model making is not only integral to the design and technical production of computer software systems, but also to the design of their interfaces, which, to a certain extent are composed of complex reflexive systems of modeling.

In the orbit of art, abstraction lies cozy within the compass of a modernist program described by Clement Greenberg as an outgrowth of a Kantian immanent critique:

The word abstract has several senses: (1) it denotes, most literally, separateness, a meaning directly correlative to its Latin root abstractus, “to draw from, separate;” (2) it means something considered apart from a particular application or real world existence, i.e.

I take three pieces from the recent CODEDOC show at the Whitney’s Artport to be representative of a certain strain of abstraction in software art that takes into account both the modernist traditions of abstraction outlined above and a cybernetic version of abstraction that, although it may share some surface characteristics with modernist painting, has a basis in the logic of its own particular essence and modes of production.

Wattenberg’s code is the most compact of the three and he focuses our attention on that part of it that “daws the picture,” just 16 lines. There is something strange in the way he has made the code presentable by formatting it in HTML with color-coding, and then included in the code’s comments notations about the display of the code that is achieved outside of it. A programmer is perhaps nervous that code is impenetrable and he needs to help the viewer to see what is important. Still, most any casual viewer would be baffled even by these few lines.