Coding, art, and kinetics. An interview with Joachim Sauter

Abstract

I met Joachim Sauter at UDK/Universität der Künste Berlin (University of the Arts) during my post-doctoral research year there. My main interest in this interview was to get to know the creative process of coding, especially programming codes developed by artists.

In the late 80s, Joachim Sauter founded ART+COM, an interdisciplinary group of artists, designers, scientists, and technologists focused on computational art. Sauter has participated in many exhibitions in different museums such as 'Centre Pompidou' Paris,'Venice Biennial’, 'Stejdilik Museum' Amsterdam, 'Museum for Contemporary Art' Sidney, 'Deichtorhallen Hamburg' , Kunsthalle Wien,'ICC' Tokyo, 'Getty Center' Los Angeles, MAXXI Rom.

Since the beginning of ART+COM, Sauter has worked in the intersection of art, design a,nd technology. He is also a full-time professor for "New Media Art and Design" at the 'University of the Arts' Berlin. Below, it is the transcription of an interview with Sauter at UDK in 2015. We talked about the way he deals with coding in his own artwork, his creative process and his thoughts on the relation of artists and programming languages.