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\begin{document}


\title{Software Art}

\author{Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel}

\date{August 15, 2001}

\maketitle



What is \emph{software art}? How can ``software'' be generally defined?
We had to answer these questions at least provisionally when we were
asked to be with the artist-programmer John Simon jr. in the jury of the
``artistic software'' award for the \emph{transmediale.01} art festival
in Berlin, Germany.

Since more than a decade, festivals, awards, exhibitions and
publications exist for various forms of computer art: computer
music, computer graphics, electronic literature, Net Art and
computer-controlled interactive installations, to name only a few,
each of them with its own institutions and discourse. Classifications
like the above show that attention is usually being paid to how, i.e.
in which medium, digital artworks present themselves to the audience,
externally. They also show that digital art is traditionally considered
to be a part of ``[new] media art,'' a term which covers analog and
digital media alike and is historically rooted in video art. But isn't
it a false assumption that digital art -- i.e. art that consists of
zeros and ones -- was derived from video art, only because computer data
is conventionally visualized on screens?

By calling digital art ``[new] media art,'' public perception has
focused the zeros and ones as formatted into particular visual, acoustic
and tactile media, rather than structures of programming. This view is
reinforced by the fact that the algorithms employed to generate and
manipulate computer music, computer graphics, digital text are
frequently if not in most cases invisible, unknown to the audience and
the artist alike. While the history of computer art still is short, it
is rich with works whose programming resides in black boxes or is
considered to be just a preparatory behind-the-scenes process for a
finished (and finite) work on CD, in a book, in the Internet or in a
``realtime interactive'' environment. The distribution of John Cage's
algorithmically generated sound play ``Roarotorio,'' for example,
includes a book, a CD and excerpts of the score, but not even a fragment
of the computer program which was employed to compute the score. 
%% artistic control of software code

While software, i.e. algorithmic programming code, is inevitably at work
in all art that is digitally produced and reproduced, it has a long
history of being overlooked as artistic material and as a factor in the
concept and aesthetics of a work. This history runs parallel to the
evolution of computing from systems that could only be used by
programmers to systems like the Macintosh and Windows which, by their
graphical user interface, camouflaged the mere fact that they are
running on program code, in their operation as well as in their
aesthetics. Despite this history, we were surprised that the 2001
\emph{transmediale} award for software art was not only the first of its
kind at this particular art festival, but as it seems the first of its
kind at all.

When the London-based digital arts project I/O/D released an
experimental World Wide Web browser, the \emph{Web Stalker}
\url{http://www.backspace.org/iod/}, in 1997, the work was perceived to
be a piece of Net Art. Instead of rendering Web sites as smoothly
formatted pages, the \emph{Web Stalker} displayed their internal control
codes and visualized their link structure. By making the Web unreadable
in conventional terms, the program made it readable in its underlying
code. It made its users aware that digital signs are structural hybrids
of internal code and an external display that arbitrarily depends on
algorithmic formatting. What's more, these displays are generated by
other code: The code of the \emph{Web Stalker} may dismantle the code of
the Web, but does so by formatting it into just another display, a
display which just pretends to ``be'' the code itself. The \emph{Web
Stalker} can be read as a piece of Net Art which critically examines its
medium. But it's also a reflection of how reality is shaped by software,
by the way code processes code. If complex systems and their generative
processors themselves become language, formulation becomes the creation
of a frame within which the system will behave, and of the control of
this behaviour. The joint operation of these processes creates its own
aesthetics which manifests itself no longer by application-restricted
assignments, but in the free composition of this system as a whole.
(Which simply is what developing software is all about.)

%% Beispiel: klassische Computer 
Since software is machine control code, it follows that digital media
are, literally, written. Electronic literature therefore is not simply
text, or hybrids of text and other media, circulating in computer
networks. If ``literature'' can be defined as something that is made up
by letters, the program code, software protocols and file formats of
computer networks constitute a literature whose underlying alphabet is
zeros and ones. By running code on itself, this code gets constantly
transformed into higher-level, human-readable alphabets of alphanumeric
letters, graphic pixels and other signifiers. These signifiers flow
forth and back from one aggregation and format to another. Computer
programs are written in a highly elaborate syntax of multiple,
mutually interdependent layers of code. This writing does not only
rely on computer systems as transport media, but actively manipulates
them when it is machine instructions. The difference is obvious when
comparing a conventional E-Mail message with an E-Mail virus: Although
both are short pieces of text whose alphabets are the same, the virus
contains machine control syntax, code that interferes with the (coded)
system it gets sent to. 

%It could be compared to the poisoned pages of Aristotle's ``Poetics'' in Umberto Eco's novel ``The Name of the Rose,'' with the difference that in computer viruses, the mere language induces the lethal dose.
Software art means a shift of the artist's view from displays to the
creation of systems and processes themselves; this is not covered by the
concept of ``media.'' ``Multimedia'', as an umbrella term for formatting
and displaying data, doesn't imply by definition that the data is
digital and that the formatting is algorithmic. Nevertheless, the ``Web
Stalker'' shows that multimedia and terms like Net Art on the one
hand and software art on the other are by no means exclusive categories.
They could be seen as different perspectives, the one focussing
distribution and display, the other one the systemics.

But is generative code exclusive to computer programming? The question
has been answered by mathematics proper and the many historical employments
of algorithmic structures in the arts. A comparatively recent classical
example is the \emph{Composition 1961 No. I, January I} by the
contemporary composer and former Fluxus artist La Monte Young, which is
at once considered to be one of the first pieces of minimal music and
one of the first Fluxus performance scores:

\begin{quotation}
``Draw a straight line and follow it.''\footnote{facsimile
reprint included in \cite{hundertmark:maciunas}, no page numbering}
\end{quotation}

This piece can be called a seminal piece of software art because its
instruction is formal. At the same time, it is extremist in its
aesthetic consequence, in the implication of infinite space and time to
be traversed. Unlike in most notational music and written theatre plays,
its score is not aesthetically detached from its performance. The line
to be drawn could be even considered a second-layer instruction for the
act of following it. But as it is practically impossible to perform the
score physically, it becomes meta-physical, conceptual, epistemological.
As such the piece could serve as a paradigm for Henry Flynt's 1961
definition of Concept Art as ``art of which the material is `concepts,'
as the material of for ex. music is sound.''\footnote{Henry Flynt,
\emph{Concept Art} \cite{flynt:concept-art} ``Since `concepts' are
closely bound up with language,'' Flynt writes, ``concept art is a kind
of art of which the material is language.''} Tracing
concept art to artistic formalisms like twelve-tone music, Flynt argues
that the structure or concept of those artworks is, taken for itself,
aesthetically more interesting than the product of their physical
execution. In analogy, we would like to define software art as art of which
the material is software.

Flynt's Concept Art integrates mathematics as well, on the acognitive
grounds of ``de-emphasiz[ing]'' its attribution to scientific
discovery.\footnote{ibid.} With this claim, Flynt coincides, if oddly,
with the most influential contemporary computer scientist, Donald E.
Knuth. Knuth considers the applied mathematics of programming an art; 
his famous compendium of algorithms is duely titled ``The Art of
Computer Programming.''\footnote{\cite{knuth:art}}

Should the transmediale software art jury therefore have consisted of
mathematicians and computer scientists who would have judged the entries
by the beauty of their code?

What is known as Concept Art today is less rigorous in its immaterialism
than the art Flynt had in mind. It is noteworthy, however, that the
first major exhibition of this kind of conceptual art was named
``Software'' and confronted art objects actually with computer software
installations.\footnote{Among them Ted Nelson's hypertext system in its
first public display, according to Edward A. Shanken, \emph{The House
that Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of ``Software'' as a Metaphor
for Art}, \cite{shanken:software}}. Curated in 1970 by the art critic
and systems theorist Jack Burnham at the New York Jewish Museum, the
show was, as Edward A. Shanken suggests, ``predicated on the idea of
software as a \emph{metaphor} for art [my emphasis],''\footnote{ibid.}.
It therefore stressed the cybernetical, social dimension of programmed
systems rather than, as Flynt, pure structure.

%If the concepts of software as pure structure and software as a generalized metaphor of social-technical interfacing can be seen as two extremes, several other aspects have to be considered beneath and in between:
Thirty years later, after personal computing became ubiquituous,
cultural stereotypes of what software is have solidified. Although the
expectation that software is, unlike other writing, not an aesthetic,
but a ``functional tool'' itself is an aesthetic expectation, software
art nevertheless has become less likely to emerge as conceptualist
clean-room constructs than reacting to these stereotypes. The ``Web
Stalker'' again might be referred to as such a piece. In a similar
fashion, the two works picked for the transmediale award, Adrian Ward's
``Signwave Auto-Illustrator'' and Netochka Nezvanova's ``Nebula M.81,''
are PC user software which acts up against its conventional
codification, either by mapping internal functions against their
corresponding signifiers on the user interface (Auto-Illustrator) or by
mapping the signifiers of program output against human readability
(Nebula M.81). 
%%Self-conscious artistic position
%%many works weren't entered for the competition

The range of works entered for the transmediale.01 software art award
shows that coding is a highly personal activity. Code can be diaries,
poetic, obscure, ironic or disruptive, defunct or impossible, it can
simulate and disguise, it has rhetoric and style, it can be an attitude.
Such attributes might seem to contradict the fact that artistic control
over generative iterations of machine code is limited, whether or not
the code was self-written. But unlike the Cagean artists of the 1960s,
the software artists we reviewed seem to conceive of generative systems
not as negation of intentionality, but as balancing of randomness and
control. Program code thus becomes a material with which artist work
self-consciously. Far from being simply art for machines, software art
is highly concerned with artistic subjectivity and its reflection and
extension into generative systems.\footnote{Or, as Adrian Ward puts it:
``I would rather suggest we should be thinking about embedding our own
creative subjectivity into automated systems, rather than naively
trying to get a robot to have its `own' creative agenda.
A lot of us do this day in, day out. We call it programming.'' (quoted
from an E-Mail message to the ``Rhizome'' mailing list, May 7, 2001)}


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