Digital Arts and Culture 2009

Programming offers arguably the greatest opportunity for creative investment in the computer. But, given the mechanistic relationship between source code and executable and the highly constrained formalisms of programming, it is hard to see where creativity would find a place within the rigor and determinism of code. This paper places this question of creativity in the context of a broader problem of creativity in the digital generally, then identifies an ontological structure, called a fold or edge, that marks the creative moment of digital interaction. In programming, the edge appears in the object, recognizable in object-oriented programming but common to every creative innovation in coding technique.