Art and Technology—Notes On Creativity In a Digital Age
(Thoughts and Words on Ones and Zeroes)

by stephen wacker

Although we still use pencils, brushes, and musical instruments, our artistic pursuits are becoming increasingly intertwined with the use of digital technology. Are we affecting our creative capabilities when we use all this increasingly complex machinery? And does digital technology help us generate ideas, or merely execute them?

These questions have been nagging at me recently, in part because of some work I did with software designers and programmers—the yin and yang forces of software creation. It seems that programmers tend to hold the purse strings of possibility by determining what is and isn't feasible, at least in my experience, which got me thinking about the methods and motivations we have for creating things.

Stereotypical computer programmers are intensely focused, to the point of being obsessive. The software they create makes computers function in certain precise ways so that we can control various processes. This is why we say the computer is a tool—it helps us do something else. Although they often work as members of a team, the single-minded ability of programmers to concentrate on the task at hand is legendary, and seems to be one of the determining factors of their success. And while some people have the ability to appreciate the elegance and symmetry of computer code, hardly anyone ever actually sees it.

Artists and designers can also be intense and obsessive, although they're trying to express something instead of trying to make a machine control a process. They may work with others to execute their ideas, but the artist's ability to conceptualize and communicate their unique vision is the determining factor of their success. And their work is much more accessible than that of programmers. No special device or training is needed to see a painting or hear a piece of music, although knowledge in either area might foster a deeper sense of appreciation. (The work of writers is also more accessible, although its need for a literate audience makes it a little more exclusive.)

Most creative people agree that their work requires ideas to slop around and interact with each other, like colors on a palette. In other words, a certain amount of playfulness or randomness is desirable. I like the way Huck Finn put it: "In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better." Granted, he was talking about victuals at the Widow Douglas' supper table, but creative thinking works the same way.

Programming and artistic expression are two different types of creativity. One involves the linear thinking processes that are formulated in the left hemisphere of the brain, and the other the associative thinking processes formulated in the right hemisphere of the brain. Are these modes of thinking the result of living in the digital age? Hardly. Both have been around for a while. But the digital age is, in a sense, the result of new combinations of these different modes of thinking. For example, the World Wide Web is a mixture of logical and intuitive innovation—blending the left-brained precision of programming languages and computer networks with the right-brained associative concepts of hypertext and graphic design.

Both types of creativity were used to create the Web. Both are also involved in the creation of art. Can software be called art? After all, software and orchestral music are both sets of instructions for a collection of individual parts to execute in a specific order.

This brings us to an interesting fork in the road. There is a remarkable similarity between software and orchestral music—both are sets of instructions based on language. However, software's purpose is to facilitate and control processes, while music is created to express a vision or a feeling. Literature, like music, is also predicated on language and created in order to express something. And the visual arts, of course, attempt to express things that aren't necessarily tied to language.

Since software doesn't exist in nature (although I confess I haven't checked religious texts for allusions to assembler or comments about COBOL), it must be the result of human creativity. But is software art? No. Software can be used to execute our ideas and create art, but it's a tool rather than a statement. The rules and syntaxes of programming languages restrict our thought processes, which inhibits artistic expression. And while the arts also have rules and syntaxes, new art is often created when rules are broken and syntax is ignored. Doing so when writing computer code merely generates error messages.

(Uh-oh. It appears that the wind is starting to blow us off course, that the runway is rising beneath our wheels, and that it's time to land this thing. Please keep your seat belts fastened until we've arrived safely at the terminal.)

An increasingly common term these days is bandwidth, which refers not only to the size of a digital pipe but also, in a more casual sense, to our mental capabilities. High-bandwidth people are said to have a wide range of knowledge, and to be capable of thinking more effectively than others. Software moguls have been heard to say that they seek out high-bandwidth people because the future of their companies depends on their ability to innovate. Yet many programmer types make pejorative use of the word "random," implying that randomness is somehow faulty and less than desirable. I find this puzzling.

It seems to me that bandwidth implies a certain randomness, and that the most knowledgeable and creative people are those whose so-called random thinking processes make connections where none have been made before. As Huck would say, the more food there is on the plate, the more juice there is to swap around and make things interesting. It's new connections that we seek—between shadow and light, between logic and intuition—when we walk the tightrope of creativity and innovation. We just need to remember the balance, as a friend's father used to say.

Does digital technology help us generate ideas? It can. Digital music synthesizers, for example, make it easy to select from a broad "palette" of tonal colors. But a broader palette can also be a burden, weighing us down with so many options that the creative vision disappears in the fog of possibilities.

So now we're back to our original question: Is digital technology affecting our creative capabilities? Probably. Is this good or bad? Well, there's this balance, you see...

Copyright © 2001 Stephen Wacker. All Rights Reserved.