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Themesicon: navigation pathGenerative Toolsicon: navigation pathEditorial
 
 
 
 
 

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overlapping points within, the texts show how complex and wide-ranging this still young field of work is, and identify aspects that need to be elucidated; these emerge not least from terminological definitions and differentiations. Inke Arns' text, which is published in the present book, «Read_me, run_me, execute_me. Code as executable text: Software art and its focus on program codes as performative texts»), points out sceptically how the term ‹generative art› has become fashionable in the last two years, appearing in contexts as different as academic discourses, media art festivals, architecture practices and design conferences. Here the term is often used if not as a synonym for software art, then without any clear differentiation from it. Generative art and software art do have something to do with each other—but what that is usually remains obscure. «Generative art,» says Arns, «defines processes that run according to determined, previously fixed rules or instructions autonomously (of the artist-programmer) or through ‹selforganization›. Generative art is interested in generative processes (and also in software or code) only to the extent that it—seen as a pragmatic tool that that is not itself

 

questioned—serves to produces an ‹unforeseeable› result. And it is precisely for this reason that the term ‹generative art› is not appropriate for describing ‹software art›, which identifies an artistic activity that enables reflection on software (and its cultural significance) within the medium of software.»

In the classical art system, no notice is usually taken of the fact the computer was and is a tool and component of art, and that it has been so for as long as the machine itself has existed. A reappraisal of this history, dealing with embedding in the art-historical context, is still desirable—Matthias Weiss asserts this in «What is Computer Art?». He therefore comes up with two incentives for art history to address computer art: he explains the historical nature of the phenomenon, and he also stresses the role of description, in order to indicate that differentiation is possible only after detailed consideration, without which comparable features of older and more recent works cannot emerge to open up the possibility of a deeper understanding of computer art. He goes against the trend of using a constant stream of new ‹categories› for shifting the art system into a field of different

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