Software Art and Aesthetic Computing: Defining the Material of Code

In 2001, Berlin's Transmediale festival introduced a category for Software Art, while Moscow's Macros-Center launched a competition culminating in the read_me festival in spring 2002. In July 2002, the Aesthetic Computing seminar at Dagstuhl brought together computer scientists, designers, and artists. That summer, ICC opened the exhibition art.bit collection. Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel defined Software Art for Transmediale as "an art whose material is the program itself." Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin wrote for read_me that it is "a program created for a purpose different from usual pragmatic purposes," and the jury declared they "consider as software art an art whose material is algorithmic instructions and/or which emphasizes the cultural concepts of software." Dagstuhl participants defined Aesthetic Computing as "the theory, practice, and application of aesthetics to programming." The article distinguishes three strata of code art: the perceptual level (desktop aesthetics), the model level (generative and algorithmic works by artists like Manfred Mohr), and the meta-model level (open source and Linux). Aesthetic Computing explores alternative aesthetics in utilitarian programming, questioning usability dogma and human-computer interaction. The author argues that the utility/art dichotomy is weak, citing Jay Bolter's transparency vs. reflectivity as a more useful distinction.