In an article on art and computer programming in Telepolis (German) “The artist as programmer”, the work of the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne is examined. An uneasy relationship between art and technology existed when Georg Trogemann began to teach IT to art students in the 1990s. His previous IT colleagues were sceptical. His students were equally suspicious of the new medium. The relationship has developed well since then.

Media art could not have come about without programming languages. Java is the preferred language and source code for Java applications is available.

The Academy's Georg Trogemann in his book “Code@art” (Springer 2005) conceives of programming as the basic technique of work and culture in our time. Art has the task of playfully pointing at the meaning of code and making it transparent.

One example of this relates to the requirement for software developers to control the predictability of software used in game development. Media-art can play with this by including unpredictability and chance in software development. Users can play in an open scenario.

The discussion “Is programming art?” (John Littler) raised the relationship of artists to their tools. In a practical way as well as theoretically, The Academy of Media Arts has united art and programming and defined what the relationship of the artist using the media of programming is. As well as adopting the techniques of the present as artistic materials as Bauhaus called for, they aim to give meaning to the medium of software through artistic software development.

The Academy works with web and interface design as well as 3D Animation and the development of computer games, especially for theatres, exhibitions and dance projects.