Fluid Code

In 1999, Mark J. Stock, PhD, took his first accidental step toward becoming an artist. He used a 3-D rendering program to help him debug some code. “The first image that came out was beautiful,” he says. “There were images within the data that shouldn’t really be there.” Just as people find shapes in clouds, Stock says, the computer serendipitously creates things we recognize, but with more possibilities. After eight years of creating art with his computational tools, Stock says he has come to understand the medium the way a painter understands paint. “Code is the farthest thing from a picture,” he says. “But I now have a much better idea of what the image will look like when I write the code.”