I was recently discussing art styles with my wife. We were heading home from the coffee shop that has become my new haunt when she started explaining what she does when she wants to experiment with a new style. “I draw my face”, she said. Curious as to why, I looked at her, quizzically.
“Well,” she continued, “just think. What other figure have you known for your entire life? I mean, you’ve seen yourself many times throughout your life. You know your curves, your smile, your defects. What else could you master so well?”
The simplicity of the argument and its elegance made me think. “It’s an artists’ Hello World.”, I voiced. She smiled, because she knew what I was talking about. After more than 4 years of hearing me think about programming out loud, she was programming-savvy enough to know that all programmers strive to complete a “Hello, World!” exercise prior to venturing forth in a new programming language.
I wonder if artists universally do that – encode themselves (or some other object) every time they try out a new medium. It’s kinda neat to think that there is a parallelism between art and programming.
On Games, Narratives, Computation, and Cognition 