Glossary

Software Art treats programming itself as the medium. An artist writes original software whose behavior, output, or logic is the work. This differs from using off-the-shelf tools; the code is often bespoke, sometimes exhibited alongside its output, sometimes exhibited as the source itself.

The idea has real institutional history: curator Jack Burnham organized Software – Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970, one of the first major exhibitions to treat systems and code as legitimate artistic material rather than a tool behind the scenes. The practice became far more accessible in the early 2000s with Processing, a programming language built specifically for artists and designers by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. It lowered the technical barrier enough that an entire generation of New Media artists learned to write their own creative software rather than relying on existing programs.

It sits at the root of most New Media Art practices, since code is frequently the layer that drives kinetic, robotic, or interactive outcomes.