Frederik Vanhoutte: Creative Coder
I have featured a selection of gifs by Frederik Vanhoutte on Cross Connect, (the link is here, Also, see more of his work on his Twitter feed and Instagram page
Frederik’s gifs are compelling to watch. The way he contrasts the black shape against dark grey with neon colored edges that are revealed as the shape expands and contracts is inspired and beautiful. He uses easing in his motion to great effect as his little machines, or systems, expand and contract in front of you
Frederik was expansive in his answers to my questions about his work and I publish the full interview below:
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Who you are and where you are from?
I’m Frederik Vanhoutte, and I’m a creative coder. I’m based in Flanders, Belgium, and currently living in Bruges.
What do you do for a living?
Professionally I’m a medical radiation expert (MPE), active in the radiotherapy department of the Ghent university hospital. What this means is that together with a team of radiation oncologists, nurses, technologist and colleague MPEs I’m responsible for the treatment of people with cancer, using radiation generated by high-energy linear accelerators.
Do you have a background in art?
My background isn’t art, it’s physics, lots of physics. I have a master in acoustics and thermodynamics, a second master in medical physics and a PhD in solid state physics.
How did you start making gifs?
My interest in creative coding grew more or less naturally from toy models, simple physics simulations we set up to test ideas. These are oversimplified and not entirely rigorous, the simulation equivalent of back of the envelope calculations.
In 2003, I came across Processing, a coding framework/application/community aimed towards designers and artists wanting to use computers in their practice. For me, the approach was from a different direction. I was familiar with the rigorous logic of programming and started using Processing for my old toy models. But unlike their original purpose, this time round I started playing around with the models for estethics sake. I didn’t know it then, but these were my first generative systems. In an “about”, I’ll typically say that creative coding fuels my curiosity in physical, biological and computational systems. And that isn’t just a sound bite. For me it represents an important way of thinking about things, of answering questions. I haven’t run out of questions yet, so it doesn’t look like I’m stopping soon.
Do you think gifs are a unique art form?
We tend to talk about the intersection of art and science, two distinct areas that converge in a certain practice. There is something to be said for the idea that that art, even when using technology and scientific terminology, isn’t science; and that science, even if pursued with passion, isn’t art. But the truth probably is that the idea of two distinct regions meeting at an intersection is the wrong metaphor, that instead there is a huge territory where these two quintessential human endeavors flow into each other, mediated by technology, neither art nor science. For me the true intersection is where we meet from different directions, from different backgrounds.
Why gifs, ate least in part of my work? Digital art has many niches but a common thread in generative systems is the emphasis on the system, the dynamics, rather than on the frozen image, the static. But the threshold to share something dynamic is higher than that of a still image. And the platforms to share it on aren’t very stable, Flash is gone, the days of java applets are past, replaced by webgl and javascript, to be replaced by…
The animated gif seems to stand the test of time better, its simplicity undoubtedly part of its success. My first reaction to the question “are gifs a unique art form” was that I don’t see animated gifs as an art form in itself, or even a goal, but as a robust, low-threshold materialization of things which are hard to convey statically,a form of animation. But to be honest, having made more gifs lately, I need to reconsider. The medium of gifs introduces several constraints that impose themselves on the art, and in through those constraints, like any medium, shapes the art, adding its unique nature to it.
So yes, it is a unique medium, a unique art form. I find myself reducing my toy models to the bare essentials when writing them for gifs. Kill your darlings, purity, whatever you can call it, it invites a certain thoughtfulness that gets lost when presented with the basically unlimited possibilities we seem to have in digital art. I genuinely believe the restrictions make the art better.
What I strive to achieve is something architects call simplexity, a complex form that has an elegant, simple underlying structure. Simplicity without visual complexity can be rather dull. Raw, wild complexity is easy to achieve but impossible to control and can paradoxically end up dull. A pet peeve of mine is that generative art often prides itself on “infinite results, each unique”, yet somehow all looking, feeling the same. Simplexity represents the goldilocks zone, neither the dullness of predictability, nor the boredom of the purely random.
As a tool I mainly use Processing. And although tools undoubtedly influence the work, it really is about ideas and principles that can be embodied in various ways. Whether it’s Houdini or threejs, Processing or Excel, or pen and paper or computer, part of the art always transcends the medium.
I hope this answers some of your questions.
Frederik Vanhoutte’s Twitter feed and Instagram page