Document:Q9943

hello world is a new media project by boredomresearch, exploring the relationship between the physical and electronic world. This work challenges the normal trend of taking physical material and rendering it in electronic form.
Most teach your self programming books begin with an exercise that writes a couple of words on the screen, supposedly the simplest starting point for learning programming. This exercise promises to enable the beginner to write a fully working program in just a few moments. The example given in textbooks almost always without fail uses the words hello world and can takes substantially more than just a few moments. The use of these sacred words symbolises your grand entrance into the digital universe and demonstrates how un-inspirational programming can be.
As artists we managed to slip in through the back door. We began using an application called Director, a multimedia authoring package made by Macromedia that necessitated no knowledge of programming. Without realising, we were tricked into using stuff that seemed more like esperanto than programming. A few versions and revisions later and presto! magically we had become programmers. We had never at any point been interested in becoming programmers but over the years our work grew in complexity in tandem with the application we used to make it and somehow to some extent we became programmers. We now take this opportunity to look at the significance of programming dependent work and express some of its qualities for those people, like us, who have no interest in coming in through the front door.