Book Review: Creative Code

While software design and programming skills have become increasingly relevant due to massive consumption of digital media, their creative potential in the arts is too often given a supporting role. The distinctions between technical minded coders and creative designers will land them in separate departments at most schools. If anything has worked to remove these barriers, it is the pioneering work of digital artist John Maeda and his students at the MIT Media lab during the early 2000s. While largely focused on creating software for visual design, the work of his Aesthetics + Computation Group (and following Physical Language Workshop) ventured into cybernetics, digital typography, and kinetic art. Their work helped to solidify the importance of digital media in the arts, with many graduates going on to dominate the creation and application of today's interactive media.

Being largely unfamiliar with Maeda’s work or the MIT Media Lab, I picked up "Creative Code", a 2004 compilation of their work, prepared for either a dense and technical book on programming or simply a collection of visually interesting project to peruse. My skeptical stance on books concerning visual arts and computer technology comes from many experiences in which these books get stuck in a one-sided perspective; finding something that lands closer in the middle can be hard to come by. Perhaps it is just a reflection of my own expertise being split fairly evenly between science and the arts. What I am fairly sure of is that technology is moving quickly to overload our lives with social media and endless visual culture. As Maeda himself remarks, “There is a lot to see, but merely that: a lot.” However, I soon found something special in the text and images of this group's work - I found a voice sharing many of the same concerns about digital arts and a surprisingly human approach to innovation beyond simply visual or digital media.

The book itself is structured in a standard fashion: eight chapters arranged by design themes. These themes range from Maeda's own portfolio to visualizing the realm of programmatic space, including the importance of staying physically present in a digital world. Each chapter has an introduction written by Maeda, followed by a selection of students’ works in the area. These include brief essays by relevant artists including Casey Reas, David Small, Joshua Davis, and Yogu Nakamura. This layout provides a steady counterbalance to the wild and varying projects presented through six hundred illustrations. This tradeoff between image and text gave the book a very fluid quality and made it an immersive read. Right off the bat, Maeda sets up a very direct and personal relationship with the reader by describing his artistic achievements as well as failures in each area. Essays at the end of each chapter also provide the reader with some theory to conceptualize the included art and place it in a broader context. Sandwiched in between, the many examples of student art hit everything from turning website activity into interactive organisms to converting turntables into optical performance systems. One of the most fascinating sections for me personally was on typography (a field which neither Maeda nor I initially took very seriously). But in this chapter I found the most bizarre and ingenious uses of text I have ever seen; for example the letter ‘A’ fluttering and swaying across a page or type made from bouncing balls drawing sentences.

By including an entire section on education, Maeda has a clear concern and interest in the future of digital and interactive arts. It seems that he hoped to help people understand and connect with these complicated fields by writing this book; to let young students know that they do not need to be expert programmers or famous designers to innovate in these new fields. What they really need is a passion for new discovery in their work. While much of the included arts and projects of this book were made before 2004 with some outdated technology, their concepts have maintained a strong relevancy to this day. Their work with web-based infrastructures for creating art is more significant than ever with society’s move towards cloud servers and live streaming media. For some readers, this book may simply function as a collection of interesting art as entertainment. But for those who are caught between the sciences and arts, this is inspiration to get out and push limits of multimedia. My main concern throughout the book was the limited experience of this art through two-dimensional images, consequently missing out on all movement, interaction, and sound. Now all I need to do is get out there and find what cutting-edge projects John Maeda and his graduates are up to today.