Mihika Bansal – Looking Outwards – 01

The particular piece of digital art that I recently became interested in is from the Whitney Museum and it’s called Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018. This piece specifically works to connect different forms of digital art that have been produced over the past 50 or so years. All the pieces that are included in this piece focus on code as their set of instructions, that they use to create a driving force of the art itself. The project also uses code to manipulate the actual output that the user sees. 

This exhibit is particularly interesting because it gives us an opportunity to look at how things have grown and changed in the digital art scene over the past 50 years. It also is a way to look at the artifacts that have been left behind in the digital space, something that we didn’t have to consider before. The exhibit touches upon the drastic change in the manner that information is now disseminated to mass amounts of people in addition to the way technology has changed the spaces that we live in, with many of our spaces now centered around an integral piece of technology in our room, like couches in a living room around a TV screen. 

The actual exhibit has work of many artists and has 4 total curators of this work. All these artists worked to create custom code, that worked to display what was needed in that instant for that viewer of the project.

Link: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/programmed