TinEye’s north wall, by the window overlooking a snowfalling Queen Street, has become a command post for JavaScript art. Eight monitors, set up vertically, screen rotating hot flashes of generative hacked art made within the last two days by a company of 30 people. Some bleed, some waver, some wash, some morph, some spirograph. Some look like screensavers and tech demos while others look like creations that could fare for a gallery space projection. The blurring snow breezing by many of the windows make complimentary neighbours to the screens. You could call the products of the Gen Art Hack Party outsider art, digital canvases painted with tinkered tech, but you’d be more objectively correct to call many works of outsider programming. Art, in all its illusive forms, was not the key goal for organizers Xavier Snelgrove, a visual programmer, and TinEye founder Leila Boujnane. Their goal was to get things, art, scripts, one-offs or otherwise, made.
Everyone in the loft sits at scattered desks and tables, command posts with at least one computer per hacker and bowls of plentiful fun-sized Hershey bars. TinEye’s office is decorated with retro robot toys, models and tech curios, like a vintage Mac or a hopefully defunct shock therapy box. The company itself is a bizarro-image search, letting users upload or scan an image to find its other homes across the web. Primary uses being for allowing photo providers like, say, Getty, to keep tabs on their usage or to find the origin of more nomadic imagery.
Boujnane, who carries a whimsical and enthusiastic presence on the floor, has hosted ‘hack-a-thons’ in the past, though this is the first to encourage such a public presence with a closing reception. With no obvious direct benefit to the company, it may seem odd that she’d be willing to donate the space, stock the fridges so full of beer and order so much food that the final leaving attendees are given loot bags of burritos and croissants. But by Boujnane’s thinking, the benefit is getting asses in chairs and fingers to code. To encourage programming literacy, if only to break it. “I don’t care what it is,” says Boujnane, “just do something.
Snelgrove shares the sentiment, “I like it when people realize that they can do something that they hadn’t done before.” Xavier, who worked for TinEye three years ago, has been art coding for some time, but mostly in ‘a vacuum.’ He hoped to one day participate in an event of this scale and style, when he decided to just organize one himself. “I don’t really have a community that I do it with,” says Snelgrove. “I was sitting here waiting for an event to happen where I could meet people, when I realized, oh wait, I could just make one myself.” He wanted an environment that pushed bantam productivity, made by people of all levels.
“Most people here created something, which is nice,” says Boujnane, “some people here knew nothing (about JavaScript).” One of those tech freshmen was Dan Misener, who won the audience choice award and grand prize, a design book thick enough to knock out a buffalo, for his roaming geometric spider-web Meatballs. Misener, who had ‘zero’ JavaScript experience, based the title on a misreading of tutorials, “I thought metaballs said ‘meatballs.’”
Screenshot of Mans_Struggle_Against_Emotion by Sasha Kondratskiy. Click the link to see the animation.My vote went towards Sacha Chua‘s faces_sachac, a pleasant near minimal platter of slightly changing facial expressions. Chua, who considers herself more of a doodler than a programmer, found herself having a lot of fun with the process. “It shows you don’t need computer math,” says Chua, “just draw smiley faces and have fun!” My personal runner-up was Sasha Kondratskiy`s Mans_Struggle_Against_Emotion, a sandstorm of red cubes, like an ESPN transitional wipe losing its form and dissipating into the air. “Cubes ‘n shit was already taken,” says Kondratskiy.
The party went all night and all day, formally beginning during a workshop on a Friday night, 24 hours before the Saturday reception. Many of the participants were wrangled through personal networks, but as word got out and the registrations ballooned, Snelgrove said he was pleased with how many came out of the woodworks. At the workshop, a few simple, hackable builds were made not only to get brains warm, but as a launching point. Those builds, and any submitted build throughout the party, were posted in real time to the website, making hacked scripts available to be hacked again and again, though no epic collaborations ever came together.
Meeting again on Saturday morning, the hackers were told to just get busy, making and submitting as much as possible. “What we wanted was for people not to be too stressed out that they had to create the one thing that was the ‘expression of their soul,’ and spend all their effort on it,” says Snelgrove, “but to produce a lot of stuff just to learn.” The first to break the ice with a submitted build got a prize just for doing so. Snelgrove and Boujnane wanted a swarm of little things, not a mound of hopeful masterpieces. In the final ten minutes of the submission blitz, the ghost of a hyped chip tune could be heard from somewhere in the office. It wasn’t coordinated, Adam Carlucci’s Partycles3 just came up on one of the rotating displays.
Looking at the art, you can sense a sequence. Certain attributes jabbed at a few times, some hackers returning to their trial runs. Kevin Branigan circulated around data he harvested from the city’s website to make DemStreets and ElevationRotation which uses geographical information about this city of ours to make it look like the red face of Mars.
Snelgrove learned programming from hacking. Initially he used a language called Processing to make smaller visual programs. He realizes how intimidating tech can seem to the world around him, especially to some more artistically inclined, but he thinks that starting with something visual, and something that asks rules to be broken, like hacking, is the proper starting point for potential developers. “It’s not for a lot of other people,” says Snelgrove, “so I thought I’d bring a lot of people together to explore that.”
For TinEye, for Snelgrove’s hobby, for artists who can’t bare to look at numbers, introducing art to hacks, in small, incidental steps, may be good for art. And for data wizards who struggle to embrace contemporary galleries, vice-versa.
Correction: Previously this article made reference to Java in places when it should have referred to JavaScript. Despite the similar name, Java and JavaScript are two different coding languages.
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Zack Kotzer is a freelance nerd in Toronto, and the assistant editor of Steel Bananas. Tweet him, if you dare @KingFranknstein.
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