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Themesicon: navigation pathGenerative Toolsicon: navigation pathSoftware Art
 
 
 
 
 

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displaying machinic creativity and whatever methods were used to form it. "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," [16] reads the emphatic definition from 2001 transmediale jury members Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel.

Software Art

The term 'software art' was first defined in 2001 by transmediale [17] , the Berlin media art festival, and introduced as one of the festival’s competition categories. [18] Software art, referred to by other authors as 'experimental' [19] and 'speculative software' [20] as well as 'non-pragmatic' and 'non-rational' [21] software, comprises projects that use program code as their main artistic material or that deal with the cultural understanding of software, according to the definition developed by the transmediale jury. Here, software code is not considered a pragmaticfunctional tool that serves the 'real' art work, but rather as a generative material consisting of machinic and social processes. Software art can be the result of an autonomous and

 

formal creative process, but can also refer critically to existing software and the technological, cultural, or social significance of software. [22] Interestingly, the difference between software art and generative design is reminiscent of the difference between software art that was developed in the late 1990s and the early computer art of the 1960s. Artworks from the field of software art "are not art created using a computer," writes Tilman Baumgärtel in his article Experimentelle Software (experimental software), "but art that takes place in the computer; it is not software programmed by artists in order to create autonomous works of art, but software that is itself a work of art. With these programmes, it is not the result that is important, but the process triggered in the computer (and on the computer monitor) by the program code." [23] Computer art of the 1960s is close to concept art in that it privileges the concept as opposed to its realisation. However, it does not follow this idea through to its logical conclusion: its work, executed on plotters and dot- matrix-printed paper, has an emphasis on the final product and not the program or process that created the work. [24] In current software art, however, this

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