How To Code Art

Each keystroke of code is the art itself. What we witness via various browser windows is a performance of the artwork (following Boris Groys’s reasoning from In the Flow). The practice of artistic creation is melded closely with the artistic artifact.

My second commit to the Git repository was titled “rennovations” as I made updates to entrance.html and hallway.html.

Every character, every byte of the source file matters. A comptemorary demonstration of this is “Red” by Pak.

“Red” facts:

It’s not a tokenized color.
It’s a tokenized pixel. (1×1)
One, single, red, pixel.

The work is my second “one pixel statement”, first one being “Alpha”.

I recommend you to download the image, open it up in a note editor, and read it.

🟥

— Pak (@muratpak) July 22, 2020

When we display our art online, we’ve also got the website location to consider;

“The problem is that what happens in the location bar is no less important than the text and the graphics. The address bar is the author’s signature. It’s where action takes place, and it’s the action itself. The real action on the web doesn’t happen on the page with its animated GIFs or funny scripts, it’s concentrated in the address bar.”

URL’s used as a creative tool, following Olia Lialina.

It’s fun to play with all the little creative details and opportunities provided by modern browsers. In https://best.effort.network/ Olia Lialina changes the colour of the favicon displayed in the browser tab dynamically. An entire play could happen in this small square, with the lines scrolling through the tab title text.

I love looking at the details, I’m keen to keep on learning and questioning the functionality of web browsers – how far can we push this medium to create art?