Whatwe can learn from visual artists about sofware development

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 efcient workfows through skilled manual execution and personal software development, but avoided high-level forms of software automation. Artists identifed conficts between their priorities and those of professional developers and computational art communities, which infuenced how they used computational aesthetics in their work. These fndings contribute to eforts 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-specifc representations, and their experiences in interdisciplinary production can aid inclusive community building around computational tools.