i am a software artist (yup says so on my business card) and i give this a hearty "yes". but not in the usual sense of code that is elegant or well crafted, th

i am a software artist (yup says so on my business card) and i give this a hearty "yes". but not in the usual sense of code that is elegant or well crafted, that's just good engineering. code becomes art when it is made with the intention of an artist. this is actually quite rare. video games barely count because most of the artistic content are just 3d models. some do count though. the most true software art is generative art: algorithms that produce abstract visuals from code only (though some take images or video and transform them). the first group of arists that did this that i am aware of called themselves the "algorists" and they worked in the mid 70s. and before that there was manfred mohr. i believe i am the first open source artist, having released generative art code under the GPL with open source as part of the explicit concept in 1992. if you know of anything earlier (or just anything really early) i would love to hear about it.