>> Great! Thank you. And now for the
last talk in this pre-lunch session.
Emily Reese, and her talk is called "The
Artist and the Programmer", except it's
in French. I'm not going to say it in
French. The artist and the programmer.

(applause)

 >> I can just hold it too. That's fine.

 >> The microphone is tricky. I told you
it's tricky.

 >> Is there a shortcut to get the
presenter notes up? In Keynote? Oh,
nope. Just trying to figure out how to
get my cursor up... Sorry, y'all. Yes!
Cool, thank you. Okay! Hi. Um... Am I
okay with the mic? Should I go any
closer? You're good? Okay, cool. It's
really hard to gauge that in here. So
I'm Emily Reese. I'm here to talk about
the arts and programming and how we can
build things as programmers for artists.

I am eclairereese everywhere on the
internet, and I made these first few
slides to really live by my words. I
made my art in an iOS app. So how can we
use our programmatical knowledge and
technical ways of thinking to help all
the cool creative stuff that's happening
on seemingly the other side of the
cultural fence? I work at Kickstarter,
as a Ruby on Rails engineer, and I
really live out these principles every
day. They're very important to me. And I
started at Kickstarter two years ago.
Not as an engineer. I didn't know how to
code. I have an undergrad in arts,
masters in arts, and working with
creators every day and seeing how they
used the tools in Kickstarter made me
want to understand how these tools
worked. And I asked if I could get the
code on my computer, our operations
engineer had to problem with that, and I
taught myself how to program and
eventually moved over to the engineering
team last year.

So that's me. And if we take a step
back, and think about the arts world in
general, the world that I came from
originally, before starting at a tech
company, you imagine something like
this. It's a white cube sort of space,
kind of uncomfortable in it. Feel like
you're not welcome, and scarcity is
everything in the art world, which is
kind of terrifying, whereas when we
build tools on the web, we think anybody
can use this, if you have an internet
connection or a computer. You can have
your friend help you learn how to
program. It's all very accessible.
Luxury art has its place in culture, but
it wasn't my scene. That's not to say
it's a bad thing, but I don't know if
anybody in this room necessarily agrees
with the principles of scarcity. And
inaccessibility.

So at the same time that this art world
exists, I feel now we live in a time
where we can take back that creative
energy a little bit, and this is fueled
by artists and makers and hackers,
probably a lot of whom are present in
this room. I definitely identify with
this. That want to break down the
barriers between art and the people that
consume art and audiences and the
ability to make art.

So... Not only are there similarities in
terms of mentality between art
production and writing code -- I think
-- but also there are all these
psychological darknesses as well. That
artists feel -- that I definitely felt
when I was studying art that I also feel
when writing code. You can say... Yeah,
I carry a sketch pad around with me all
the time and I like to draw in my free
time but I can't draw. I know how to
write a Rails app, HTML, CSS, I can get
a web page up, but no, I can't code. You
say this super excited thing about this
world you participate in and this thing
you love and then you bring yourself
down a notch because everybody feels
imposter syndrome. I always feel that
the code I write is not up to par. And
in this sense -- I know I keep harping
on that these worlds are so similar, but
that's because they are. I want to spend
the rest of my talk talking about ideas
-- if you're not sure how to enter the
world of art or the world of code,
people have done a good job of fusing
the two.

So the first idea -- real life things
that people have already made. A
database of prints to keep things
central and to help researchers identify
artwork. As you know, prints -- there
can be any number of prints that an
artist makes. The thing about prints is
that they're reproducible. So how can
you keep track of all these prints that
exist at all these institutions all over
the world, what year they were printed
and so forth -- super complicated. But it
need not be. The technology between the
example I want to give is the
ukiyo-e.org website. In short, the site he
built... John Resig, creator of JQuery,
huge woodblock fan. He made a site with
an enormous database of prints and uses
these crazy analysis tools I don't
understand. I saw a talk about it once,
but I would love to know more about it.
If you want to talk about that, I would
love to hear it during a break. He
collects samples from institutions all
over the world, museums, galleries,
places that have prints, puts it
together in one database and runs image
analysis -- you can upload, run it on
the site, and see what other things
exist. It's a way of negating art world
scarcity, here's the web doing its
thing, for an art world that wouldn't
otherwise be able to do it. And it's
translated in English and Japanese for
researchers all over the world. I have a
habit of naming my screenshot pictures
-- I preface them with very cool... Like
backer tool or something like that. To
here's a screenshot from that, the
image, the original thing we're looking
at... This says it's from the Met, and
all the other prints that exist similar
to this are down below. And the
institutions at which they appear.

So that's great and awesome. So next
up... An art game. I don't know how many
game developers are in this room. I
would assume at a programming conference
about enthusiasm and making cool stuff
and programming there would be some.
Huh?

 >> Sorry, nothing.

 >> It's okay. So this game is called
"Art Game", which is pretty actually
described for this talk -- by a guy
named Pippin Barr. He makes a lot of
great stuff. All 8 bit, and pretty
great. I won't read this whole paragraph
to you, but most important to me are...
Follow your dreams, be a star of the art
world, be a horrible failure, be an
artist. Which is generally how it works
out for artists. You're either crazy
successful and rake in millions of
dollars or you're less than successful
and you're waiting for your big break.
So the technology -- here's all the
stuff he used, Art Game was written in
ActionScript 3, using Flash Builder,
and a shout out for the person who made
it. You can play this game in the
browser. You don't have to be on Steam
or anything like that. You choose your
artist. I always choose the French
person. As you saw, my title was in
French too. I speak French. So I've
never been anyone else and I've never
played the two player version. That's a
challenge for you. You head into MoMA
and meet the curator, and the curator is
like... I want to you to produce some
work for MoMA. This is a great
opportunity, right? And you play snake
to make the painting. It's really great.
As soon as you lose snake, your head
hits your tail accidentally, the
painting is over. So I obviously didn't
make it very far in this painting,
because it's not a complicated snake.
But it's done. You can throw a title in
there. "Untitled" feels very artsy to me.
So then your painting is propped up
against the wall and you can press enter
to call the curator and be like... My
work is done here. The curator comes and
rejects this particular painting. I've
never had a painting be accepted.

Yeah, it's really fun. It's just in the
browser, so simple, and I love this,
because it gives 8 bit form and a super
programmatic feel to something that is
hard to put into words about art. It
articulates this sort of horrible
rejection, but also great potential for
success. You've just got to make a
thing. So next up, a robot that draws a
picture from a computer. And this is
similar to a 3D printing sort of thing,
where you give a robot something you
want the robot to make and it makes that
thing for you.

The technology... Oh my God. I'm a Rails
developer, so Node freaks me out, but
this is written in Node, and one of our
other developers at Kickstarter it
behind this, and he worked on it with
two of our other developers. So the
source is up on GitHub if you want to
check it out. These are some images of
the robot doing its thing. Surely there
are other iterations of this. But these
three people made this thing in twelve
hours. And yeah. On the left, you can
see... I don't know. These images are
kind of small, because I took them on
the fly, so the quality is not that
high. But you can see the images on the
computer and the robot is printing it
out in the middle, and all their hacky
supplies are on the right. This is a
maker version of this intersection of
art and technology. And everything
maker-y has that at its core. Finally
back to the woodblocks. These previous
examples were things that were more
technologically oriented, and they were
portraying art. It's going in the other
direction -- how can art portray
technology? Japanese woodblocks are a
super old art form, honed in terms of
precision and technique. And you've seen
stuff like the wave crashing that
everybody knows, and illustrations of
Mount Fuji. So I'm sorry for the
Wikipedia quote.

Here's somebody making a print. But
so... To modernize the woodblock print,
you add video game characters to it. So
since Japanese culture has made amazing
video games, and Japanese culture has
also done great woodblock printing,
combine the two. This was a Kickstarter
project, probably my favorite one that
has ever been on the site. Jed Henry and
Dave Bull made these things. My video
game parlance is not quite up to speed,
but I know Pikachu when I see it, and a
Pokemon scene on the right. I love it so
much. So even if code isn't your thing,
you can definitely take elements of code
and programming and add them to your art
or whatever creative thing that you do.
Long story short, the Japanese games we
love are a new chapter in an ancient and
enduring culture. This is true of art
and technology. Here's my last
illustration and my intense code snippet
for my talk. Science and technology can
add this entirely new dimension to art
and creativity and free technology from
its more objective constraints, so let's
make more stuff like this.

(applause)