Software art

Software art refers to works of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software art has attained growing attention since the late 1990s. It is closely related to Internet art since it often relies on the Internet, most notably the World Wide Web, for dissemination and critical discussion of the works. Art festivals such as FILE Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo), Transmediale (Berlin), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz) and readme (Moskow, Helsinki, Aarhus, Dortmund) have devoted considerable attention to the medium and through this have helped to bring software art to a wider audience of theorists and academics.

The POCOS project addresses long term preservation of software art.

Selection of artists and works

• Scott Draves is best known for creating the Electric Sheep in 1999, the Bomb visual-musical instrument in 1995, and the Fractal flame algorithm in 1992.
• Jaromil, author of various GNU/Linux applications, has published famous art pieces as this shell forkbomb featured across art venues and essays worldwide. He is also developing FreeJ, a vision mixer he is employing in theater and live performances.
• Robert B. Lisek, creator of NEST - Citizens Intelligent Agency and GGGRU worm, dataminig software for searching hidden patterns and links between people, groups, objects, events, places /based on LANL's and GRU's antiterrorist software
• Bob Holmes an artist who creates websites that are signed, exhibited and sold in galleries and Museums as autonomous artworks.
• Netochka Nezvanova is the author of nebula.m81, an experimental web browser awarded at Transmediale 2001 in the category "artistic software". She is also the creator of the highly influential nato.0+55+3d software suite for live video manipulation.
• Jason Salavon is known for the creation of "amalgamations" that average dozens of images to create individual, ethereal "archetype" images.
• Alexei Shulgin is well known for this 386DX performance group, but is also credited with early software art-inspired creations.
• Adrian Ward has won several awards for his Signwave Auto-Illustrator, a generative art graphic design application, which parodies Adobe Photoshop.
• Martin Wattenberg is one of the pioneers of data visualization art, creating works based on music, photographs, and even wikipedia edits.

External links

• [1] an online exhibition of electronic art
• File Festival an exhibition of electronic art
• runme.org is an online repository for software art.
• CODeDOC is an exhibition of artistic code, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
• Transmediale have a software art category in their yearly festival.
• code an online exhibit of open-source code art.
• Thomas Dreher Conceptual Art and Software Art: Notations, Algorithms and Codes (November 2005).
• Improvisations of the Software MAXXI - National Museum of the Arts of the XXI century ROME (Italian)
• The networked media study and research programs of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam have produced the anthologies Software Studies (MIT Press 2008) and FLOSS + Art (OpenMute 2009)

Further reading

• DATA browser 02 (2005). Engineering Culture: On 'The Author as (Digital) Producer'. Autonomedia / Arts Council England. ISBN 1-57027-170-4
• Barreto, Ricardo and Perissinotto, Paula “the_culture_of_immanence”, in Internet Art. Ricardo Barreto e Paula Perissinotto (orgs.). São Paulo, IMESP, 2002. ISBN 85-7060-038-0.
• Luining, Peter (2004). Read_Me 2004. An extensive review of the Run_Me software art conference/ festival held in Aarhus, Denmark 2004.
• Bosma, Josephine (2004). Constructing Media Spaces
• Broeckmann, Andreas (2006). Software Art Aesthetics
• Broeckmann, Andreas (2004). Runtime Art: Software, Art, Aesthetics
• Oliver Grau: Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, MIT-Press/Leonardo Books, Cambridge 2003.
• Magnusson, Thor (2002). Processor Art: Currents in the Process Oriented Works of Generative and Software Art
• Christine Buci-Glucksmann, "L’art à l’époque virtuel", in Frontières esthétiques de l’art, Arts 8, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004
• Paul, Christiane (2003). Digital Art (World of Art series). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-20367-9.
• Edward A. Shanken. (1998). "The House that Jack Built - Jack Burnham's Concept of 'Software' as a Metaphor for Art" Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10.
• Edward A. Shanken (2002). "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art" Leonardo 35:4: 433-38.
• - Software Art Andreas Broegger Copenhagen
• Mitchell Whitelaw. Metacreation: art and artificial life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004