Seeing Eye-To-Eye: Supporting Transdisciplinary Learning

What is Interactive Art? What is Programming? For the purposes of this paper, interactive art is an art system that changes as a result of the presence of or action by the audience-participant. Viewing interactive art as an art system shows us that it is actually quite a complex field, involving various creators and audiences, not just a set of computational artefacts with an 'optimal' configuration. We can say that programming is the articulation of statements in a programming language. Yet any reasonable definition of programming today (for example, the common one that programming is a specification of a computation) can describe all uses of a computer. This means that there is no particular ontological distinction between programming a computer and using it, so we might as well call all uses of a computer different forms of 'programming'. We can use differences between different levels of programming to place programming languages on a continuum between two poles, termed here 'popular programming' and 'deep programming'. 'Popular programming' ranges from simple direct manipulation, through developing spreadsheet formulae, to, at best, hacking another's JavaScript, Max or Director code. 'Deep programming' is characterised by expert usage of a general-purpose language , such as C or assembly language, in combination with an expert knowledge of computer architecture. For the sake of simplicity, the term 'programming' will from now on be used to refer to the entire continuum between popular and deep. So, by 'ability to program', I mean 'ability to deep program'. Why is Programming Important to Art? We have known for some time that computers allow us to think thoughts that are impossible to think with any other tool, but what is it about the tool that allows new thought? An examination of the important developments in computing history indicates following four technological strengths, which I call the four Ss: speed, slavery, synaesthesia and structure. Other significant developments (such as the Internet) exploit one or more of these. Treated briefly here, 'Speed' refers to the computer's ability to do certain things quicker than we can. In interactive art, the goal is often to generate the response 'in real time'. 'Slavery' is descriptive of both the incredible cheapness and unquestioning obedience of computation, allowing artists and programmers to create massive and wide-ranging programmatic edifices. Such power carries with it the danger of genie-in-the-bottle or sorcerer's apprentice-style mishaps. 'Synaesthesia' is another way of describing that all …