Art and software: Project proposal Draft Working document

Art and computer science have been in contact since the sixties. In 1970, Sakky Yeates Sedelow in her visionary paper [15] summarizes and elaborates the requirements that humanities and fine arts pose on computer research and vice versa. Knuth in his award lecture, when he received the ACM Turing Award in 1974, addressed the topic of Computer Programming as an Art. In that lecture, Knuth provides an overview of the concept of art and its role in science and computer programming[3]. When internet exploded in the nighties, the phenomena of software art and internet art become wide[8]. I teach an interdisciplinary project course on the topic of IT and art for the third time [13]. Also by help of this course, I have come in direct contact with the Norwegian arena for new media art (like Trondheim Electronic Art center (TEKS) [16] in Trondheim) and have acquired knowledge on the main literature sources in the field. This is documented at [11] and a summary is provided in this document. Figure 1 refers to an example of cooperation with TEKS. For the purpose of this document I define software art as any artistic expressions in which software plays a significant role. This may include music, installations, web art, robots, etc.. When looking at the software art field, one can take several perspectives. The most common one is the perspective of the artist or art curator or art theorist. Another perspective is to observe software art, through the empirical software researcher perspective. This means that one observe an artistic expression and its development and fruition process as one study any other software systems. This observation is grounded on my own experience as a researcher in the empirical software engineering field [12]. This project will take the second perspective.