Today it was the first class of Ramsey Nasser, a computer artist and designer. In this few year, I’ve tried to consider and relativize programming as one of painting tools such like brush, pencil, and plaster. However, through this class, I came to think it might be a bit unreasonable, at least with the present.

Programming is still depending on a text information, unlike other painting tools. In addition, there’s significant latency between ‘implementing’ and ‘executing’. If I put an oil color to canvas, I can see its result momentarily. However, Programming cannot behave such like this. So I inspired his thought that ‘Processing is not enough for instinctive creative coding since it has “Run” button.”

How to make programming more instinctive tool? Now I assume programming itself could not be instinctive forever. And what we can do with programming will be able to be achieved by GUI with the times. I don’t mean humankind will not need programming near future. However, coding as implementing variables, functions following to very struct syntax will be not essential except for few people, like even professional creative coder doesn’t need to write an assembly language anymore.

On the other hand, highly encapsulated system and software tend to put a limit on artists’ imagination unconsciously. Many graphic designers who using Illustrator barely come up with procedurally created logo because it doesn’t allow them to draw with a more generative approach. So no matter how the technology develops, we as new media artists still have a role to explore lower-level layers of computation, hack them, and inspire the other artists whose idea are limited by the design concepts of their software.