John P. Bell | |
|---|---|
 John P. Bell at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, May 2013 | |
| Born | 1 June 1979 |
| Nationality | American |
| Website | www |
John P. Bell is a digital artist, educator, and software developer at Dartmouth College and the University of Maine whose work centers on creative collaboration and digital culture.
Bell began developing software to support digital humanities and art at the University of Maine's Still Water lab in 2003. He joined the teaching faculty of University of Maine's New Media department in 2008.
In 2011 he became one of the founding faculty of the University of Maine's Innovative Communication Design and Digital Curation programs. [1] Simultaneously, Bell and his collaborators Richard R. Corey and Bethany Engstrom proposed an unusual doctoral program where the three would work together on a shared research project and collective dissertation studying collaboration in the arts. The three were awarded interdisciplinary PhDs from the University of Maine in 2014 based on this work, and the pattern of critically studying collaborative methods by applying them would become prominent in Bell's later work.
Bell has argued that the principles and methods used in the development of Open-Source Software can be applied to other areas of creative production. [2] He applied this theory in the production of The Pool, an online project design workspace conceived of by Jon Ippolito, Owen Smith, Joline Blais, Mike Scott, and others that was described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a "new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs." [3]
Bell expanded on the relationship between code and culture as a co-author of the book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, which examined how the titular one-line BASIC program could be read from interconnected technical, historical, and social contexts using methods from critical code studies. [4] The book's publication renewed interest in the 10 PRINT program and prompted ports to other languages, [5] coding tutorials, [6] and generative artwork [7] based on the simple pattern it creates. Despite not being explicitly about gaming, PC Gamer called 10 PRINT one of the best books about video games in 2016. [8]
In 2007 Ippolito and Bell redesigned the Variable Media Questionnaire, a tool that encapsulates the variable media paradigm for preservation of art pioneered by Ippolito in the 1990s. [9] Bell designed the third generation of the tool, again applying software design principles to art by re-envisioning the variable media paradigm to treat an artwork as a system of modular components with defined interactions and parameters that was inspired by object oriented programming patterns. [10]
Applesoft BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC, developed by Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland, supplied with the Apple II series of computers. It supersedes Integer BASIC and is the BASIC in ROM in all Apple II series computers after the original Apple II model. It is also referred to as FP BASIC because of the Apple DOS command FP used to invoke it, instead of INT for Integer BASIC.
Spaghetti code is a pejorative phrase for unstructured and difficult-to-maintain source code. Spaghetti code can be caused by several factors, such as volatile project requirements, lack of programming style rules, and software engineers with insufficient ability or experience.
Tiny BASIC is a family of dialects of the BASIC programming language that can fit into 4 or fewer KBs of memory. Tiny BASIC was designed by Dennis Allison and the People's Computer Company (PCC) in response to the open letter published by Bill Gates complaining about users pirating Altair BASIC, which sold for $150. Tiny BASIC was intended to be a completely free version of BASIC that would run on the same early microcomputers.
A programming paradigm is a relatively high-level way to structure and conceptualize the implementation of a computer program. A programming language can be classified as supporting one or more paradigms.
Integer BASIC is a BASIC interpreter written by Steve Wozniak for the Apple I and Apple II computers. Originally available on cassette for the Apple I in 1976, then included in ROM on the Apple II from its release in 1977, it was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners.
Commodore BASIC, also known as PET BASIC or CBM-BASIC, is the dialect of the BASIC programming language used in Commodore International's 8-bit home computer line, stretching from the PET (1977) to the Commodore 128 (1985).
In computer programming, a one-liner program originally was textual input to the command line of an operating system shell that performed some function in just one line of input. In the present day, a one-liner can be
HP Time-Shared BASIC is a BASIC programming language interpreter for Hewlett-Packard's HP 2000 line of minicomputer-based time-sharing computer systems. TSB is historically notable as the platform that released the first public versions of the game Star Trek.
The conservation and restoration of new media art is the study and practice of techniques for sustaining new media art created using from materials such as digital, biological, performative, and other variable media.
Jon Ippolito is an artist, educator, new media scholar, and former curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Ippolito studied astrophysics and painting in the early 1980s, then pursued Internet art in the 1990s. His works explore digitally induced collaboration and networking, a theme that is prominent in his later scholarship.
Goto is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It performs a one-way transfer of control to another line of code; in contrast a function call normally returns control. The jumped-to locations are usually identified using labels, though some languages use line numbers. At the machine code level, a goto is a form of branch or jump statement, in some cases combined with a stack adjustment. Many languages support the goto statement, and many do not.
Still Water was a research and development laboratory at the New Media Department of the University of Maine that studied and built networks for artists, academics, and other creative professions. Still Water examined networking from technical, social, and political angles; specific areas of interest included online collaboration, indigenous sharing protocols, and limits placed on artistic remixes and filesharing by intellectual property law.
This article attempts to set out the various similarities and differences between the various programming paradigms as a summary in both graphical and tabular format with links to the separate discussions concerning these similarities and differences in extant Wikipedia articles.
PlayPower is a non-profit organization designed to create free educational computer software for low income families in India and other developing countries. After 2012 the project was reformed as PlayPower Labs, LLC, which focuses now on educational games for mobile platforms.
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of objects, which can contain data and code: data in the form of fields, and code in the form of procedures. In OOP, computer programs are designed by making them out of objects that interact with one another.
Glitch art is an art movement centering around the practice of using digital or analog errors, more so glitches, for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. It has been also regarded as an increasing trend in new media art, with it retroactively being described as developing over the course of the 20th century onward.
Critical code studies (CCS) is an emerging academic subfield, related to software studies, digital humanities, cultural studies, computer science, human–computer interface, and the do-it-yourself maker culture. Its primary focus is on the cultural significance of computer code, without excluding or focusing solely upon the code's functional purpose. According to Mark C. Marino, it
is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a socio-historical context. CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems in addition to particular interpretive methods developed particularly for the discussions of programs.
In information visualization and graphic design, Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed in a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each tile can be used to visualize information associated with the tile's position within the tiling.
Joline Blais is a writer, educator, new media scholar, and permaculture designer.
SCELBAL, short for SCientific ELementary BAsic Language, is a version of the BASIC programming language released in 1976 for the SCELBI and other early Intel 8008 and 8080-based microcomputers like the Mark-8. Later add-ons to the language included an extended math package and string handling. The original version required 8 kB of RAM, while the additions demanded at least 12 kB.