Artist10: Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis  is a graphic designer, programmer, web designer, and avid gardener. He was one of the first and most influential Flash artists. He refers to himself as a 'design technologist', using tech to push how he does art and what he creates. Here's a video of Davis explaining his life and work:

 In the video he discusses the computer as being purely a tool in his art. He specifically tries not to use the computer for inspiration, choosing instead to pull from his love of flora for the driving force behind much of his work. He takes flowers from his garden and scans them. Using what looks like Flash (and maybe some Processing), he writes a program which compiles and manipulates the images. He talks about letting the program run and playing with variables, not knowing what the result will exactly be. He lets the art run its course, allowing the finished piece to coalesce from his random tweeking.

Davis relies heavily on 'chaos' and chance to create many aspects of his art, letting programs run until he sees something he likes develop. This seemingly haphazard relinquishing of control is a rarity in programming. Often, the goal of the programmer is to conceptualize and control each minute detail and operation of a program, but Davis has specifically written his programs to work completely differently from this norm. He gives his programs only faint parameters that it stays within, allowing the code to work itself through, pulling from chaos something appealing to the human eye.