In the early days of computing in art, the artists had no choice but to develop their own programs. Some of them were deliberatly working on computing as art and/or computing as an art tool (Harold Cohen, Peter Beyls, Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, etc.). Then, we witnessed the birth of the software industry that provides "packaged programs" to anybody including artists (i.e. Photoshop, Director, etc.). I make a difference between a "program" that is dedicated and "hand made" for a specific purpose and a "software" that is general and "mass produced". Today, there is a sort of "come back" to programing as an art form or a tool for art. We can see it in the very existence of this seminar as well as in the new Software Art price put together by Transmediale, or the distinction between the prices "Net Excellence" and "Net Vision" of Ars Electronica. The Internet has drawn again the attention to the "code" (i.e. the language). From my point of view there are different levels of programing and "art of the code" (as we say in French) : 1) writting code to produce artworks that deals with the code, which content *is* the code ; 2) writting specific code to achieve some effects, some artwork (i.e. digital literature, specifically the French trend is a very good example of that) and 3) artworks based on the GUI and/or the existing Internet tools and codes (like all the artistic works about browsers for instance and most of the net.art pieces). 
I am interested in figuring out what are the different typologies of "software art", aesthetic computing, the relations and differences from the early days and what kinds of aesthetics is emerging from this, what kinds of art forms and "objects".