What We Can Learn From Visual Artists About Software Development

TL;DR

This paper investigates how visual artists learn and use software, revealing their motivations, workflows, and conflicts with developers, to inform better integration of creativity and technology in art.

Contribution

It provides new insights into artists' software practices and highlights opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusive community building in computational art.

Findings

Artists learn software for growth and community access.

They prefer manual workflows over automation.

Conflicts exist between artists and professional developers.

Abstract

This paper explores software's role in visual art production by examining how artists use and develop software. We conducted interviews with professional artists who were collaborating with software developers, learning software development, and building and maintaining software. We found artists were motivated to learn software development for intellectual growth and access to technical communities. Artists valued efficient workflows through skilled manual execution and personal software development, but avoided high-level forms of software automation. Artists identified conflicts between their priorities and those of professional developers and computational art communities, which influenced how they used computational aesthetics in their work. These findings contribute to efforts in systems engineering research to integrate end-user programming and creativity support across software and physical media, suggesting opportunities for artists as collaborators. Artists' experiences writing software can guide technical implementations of domain-specific representations, and their experiences in interdisciplinary production can aid inclusive community building around computational tools.