Furthermore, I found myself surrounded by engineers who rarely shared my interest. In spite of this I continued moonlighting my obsessions and have grown a library of 7 full shelfs (excluding school books, library checkouts, and kindle downloads) and cases of art supplies.

It's common with programmers to look down on wannabe artists that do not adhere to strict logic in creation or conversations. (Just try asking an artist what they were trying to achieve with their piece. Your answer will be a glare of pity mixed with disgust. I often find, thought not always, this is a diversion tactic because the concept is to "fuzzy" to convince anyone of it).

But when you strip Great Art to its pure essence you will discover a philosophical theory that adheres to a form of logic. We are not completely in the wrong to view this with skepticism since many pseudo-artists can not see this, let alone create it themselves; their only option is to fake it and hope their bravado convinces other. With programming we have no such luxury, if you are incompetent no level of bullshit will make your design work.

This leads me to my current situation where I am trying to find a way to integrate my love of programming with my innate drive to explore beyond the limitations imposed by my code. For now this means waking at 5am, writing for 3-4 hours, going to work until 7, writing a few more hours, then sleep.

Believe it or not, this regiment actually makes me a better programmer. I find myself not only more relaxed during the day, but often am able to rethink my solution and identify flaws instead of powering into the code as I once did.

I am not sure this helped, but my main message was that learning to think about things in a different way gives you a versatility that manifests in ways you may not anticipate. In my case, I feel it helped me be a better coder. (Think of it as studying lisp even though you primarily code in C. Its an exercise that gives your brain flexibility)

Also Maker Faire for artsy DIY and hardware stuff: http://makerfaire.com/

Zer01, a Bay Area art/technology network: http://zero1.org/

I volunteer for those last two, send me a message if you're in the Bay Area and want to chat! I'm definitely a techie software engineer, but I'm fascinated by art, good design, and grand ideas about anything =)

http://detrus.nivr.net/http://detrus.nivr.net/space/thumbfolio/AS2.html

Back in 2003 I was inspired by the likes of http://www.flight404.com and gmunk (who recently worked on the tron2 movie http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178). I became a regular designer/production monkey for a while, before getting serious about programming, trying a UX A/B template startup.

There's a lot of programmer artists in the http://processing.org/ and open frameworks world. Probably a bigger movement there than the no-code digital art movement of the early 00's, which flight404 was also part of.

I heard one guy talk about a studio job doing processing style exhibitions, mentioned it doesn't pay a lot. Flight404 popularized the trend and had/has a hard time making money from it.

I'm also big advocate for the idea that art is a kind of research, that artists are researchers just like scientists, ie, the same way a car company would have an R&D department thinking of future cars, artists are a kind of R&D department for humanity thinking of possible futures (and ways of understanding our present).

Some links to my work

http://thesystemis.comhttp://eyewriter.orghttp://yesyesno.com

I've developed a digital metrics application for my current employer that polls data from several sources, and presents it in an easy to digest infographic for employees.