Google Interactive Dev Art: Coding Creativity

Art isn’t just photography, painting or sculpting. It’s also in code in the Google Dev Art initiative.

aNewDomain.net — Sculpting, figure drawing and oil painting are all beautiful forms of art. So is photography, cinematography and the digital art found on iPad canvases these days. It turns out Google is betting that another art form can be just as popular and beautiful as all those classics. It’s called Dev Art.

Dev Art lets the developer (a typically non-creative profession) put on an artistic hat and go with the flow. Some lucky developer may even be commissioned by Google to display their work in London or future art shows. Scroll below the fold for the Dev Art teaser video.

Dev Art

Image credit: Dev Art

Interactive Coding

There are people in this world who take a paint brush and create beautiful images effortlessly. This is also true for developers who can take C, Java or objective-C to create the incredible apps and programs we love and use today.

When it comes to Dev Art, though, it’s the 1’s and 0’s of the compiled code that translate into stunning art. Not a program, per se, and definitely not another messenger app. It’s art, with code.

In typical Google fashion, multiple platforms and APIs are available for the project, letting developers be as creative as they can be. You can use the standard Android or Apple iOS platform, but there’s also support for Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Curious which specific APIs are available? Don’t sweat it. You’ll have a harder time finding which API isn’t available.

Google’s Summer Offerings

The commission and forward movement of Dev Art is promising. What else does Google Developers have up its sleeve? Google I/O 2014 is just around the corner (June 25-26th in San Francisco). Is this a sneak peek of more art endeavors to come?

I look forward to the offerings from Google this summer — not only in the world of Android or Chrome, but in other real-life applications such as art and entertainment. Check out this teaser video for Dev Art below.


I’m Ant Pruitt for aNewDomain.net.

Based in Charlotte, NC, Ant Pruitt is an IT pro, a columnist and the podcast captain at aNewDomain.net. Look for his Smartphone Photographers Community and on Yet Another Tech Show. Follow him @ihavnolyfe or on Google+ and email him at Ant@aNewDomain.net. See all Ant’s articles on aNewDomain.net by following this link.

2 Comments

  • Wow — that takes me back to the days when computer art was just getting under way. I even dabbled myself, and your post got me to Google the book “Artist and Computer” by Ruth Leavitt, which I found at: http://www.atariarchives.org/artist/ — scroll down and there is a link to something of what I was up to. (I’ve still got a silkscreen print of one of those images).

    Those were the days when men were men — you programmed in assembly language, debugged from core dumps and waited till the next day for your output after submitting a batch job. The images in the article would have taken a day each (they were made on a machine that was used for space program image processing).