Seven long years ago we were having an artist vs programmer discussion and my friend Dave (who is both) asked:
How low level can one go in this contest...
... did the artist develop the "language" they used to write the program to produce the art...
... did the artist write the compiler which compiles the program into machine code which runs the program which displays the art....
... did the artist build the computer which was used to write the program and run the program...
... did the artist build the components for the computer which was used to write the program to ....
... did the artist manufacture the materials used to fabricate the components used for the computer....blah, blah, blah.
[...]
Pre-developed software is a tool, so are programming development languages. They both are tools which can be used as a means to do interesting things.
We are still discussing this, even after the camps of "hacking vs defaults" were identified in '07. I say "we"--that's people interested in so-called new media art who still have blogs. The gallery art world is all on Facebook swapping jpegs around under Mark Zuckerberg's watchful eye--not much investigation of the inherent nature of the medium is possible there, is there?