My Dear Computer

The computer is not my enemy. Do not tell me to paint French gardens when so much of my time is spent gazing at the computer.

Growing up, I saw my father, a mathematician, collect composition notebooks full of scratch work. It felt like magic, a language of intricate pictures I could not comprehend. As I took more math classes, I began to understand more of what exactly these mysterious symbols meant. As a Computer Science student myself, I have also accumulated many pieces of paper from solving math problems of my own. I see these as precious artifacts in my artistic practice.

Throughout my CS journey, I've found myself most drawn to problems that lend themselves to diagrams. In a computer systems course, I had to implement a memory allocation library, a project done thousands of times before me. By the end of the assignment, I was left with pages of hasty arrows, numbers, and rectangles. At some point in time, these lines represented what was happening under the hood of my implementation to meet some goal. Now, the meaning of these drawings has faded from my memory. The drawings are evidence of my time and efforts spent towards something, though the end feels insignificant.

Someone very close to me asked me what makes me angry. I told them that what I believe to be the three big evils in my life: imperialism, gender, and generational trauma. I thought that the computer married these three evils; the computer was invented during war-time, CS is a male-dominated field, and a few members of my family work in tech. Following this, I told them that I thought love was the solution to these evils. My emotionally charged compositions were a childish attempt at expressing it. I strictly made art without the computer; using large, bold marks felt faster than typing and debugging.

In my junior fall, I took one technical CS class, Computer Graphics, and ended up dropping it mid-semester. This was my first time experiencing college without any programming assignments. I filled up the free time with oil painting but after a few weeks, I began feeling limited by this medium. Each layer I paint covers the previous one and it becomes unrecoverable. The computer is the opposite; code has the power to make objects mutable. Adding another degree of freedom opens up an uncountably infinite number of possibilities. Similarly, deleting parameters can create whatever constraints I choose.

I have been shown the computer against my own will but I still look for her when she's gone.

The computer is not my enemy.

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