Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018
Sept 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019
Signal, Sequence, Resolution:
Image Resequenced
4
Several of the “programmed” works here reflect on how rules and code are used to rearrange images. Nam June Paik’s massive wall of televisions, Fin de Siècle II, for example, choreographs music videos and “dissolves” the television program into combinations of dancing patterns, providing a different framework to understand broadcasting. Other works resequence images while engaging with such varied subject matter as image processing, interactive storytelling, and political commentary. Steina’s multichannel video installation Mynd investigates the aesthetic effects of software processing, while Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interactive installation Lorna prompts visitors to navigate a branching narrative with multiple endings and the two works from Barbara Lattanzi’s series C-Span x 4 annotate news reportage with subtitles borrowed from a political sci-fi film or karaoke-format song lyrics.
Siebren Versteeg, New York Double Hung, 2008
Siebren Versteeg (b. 1971), New York Double Hung, 2008. Digital collage, output from internet-connected computer program with two touch screens, 60 × 42 × 7 in. (152.4 × 106.7 × 17.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Robert D. Bielecki 2017.241
New York Double Hung is a diptych of horizontal touchscreens—which visitors are invited to operate— that shows an ever-changing collage of images compiled from a combination of internet sources. The collage is always larger than the frame of the screen, and the areas extending beyond the frame are updated and revised continuously with new information. By touching the screen and dragging the collage, in the same way one might drag an image on Google maps, the viewer can bring the newly created sections into view but other areas are simultaneously being redrawn. Siebren Versteeg’s programming “hand” is a persistent presence working just outside of what is visible, thereby pointing to the algorithms driving the internet beyond the small window of information we encounter on our screens.
Artists
- Josef Albers
- Cory Arcangel
- Tauba Auerbach
- Jonah Brucker-Cohen
- Jim Campbell
- Ian Cheng
- Lucinda Childs
- Charles Csuri
- Agnes Denes
- Alex Dodge
- Charles Gaines
- Philip Glass
- Frederick Hammersley
- Channa Horwitz
- Donald Judd
- Joseph Kosuth
- Shigeko Kubota
- Marc Lafia
- Barbara Lattanzi
- Lynn Hershman Leeson
- Sol LeWitt
- Fang-yu Lin
- Manfred Mohr
- Katherine Moriwaki
- Mendi + Keith Obadike
- Nam June Paik
- William Bradford Paley
- Paul Pfeiffer
- Casey Reas
- Earl Reiback
- Rafaël Rozendaal
- Lillian Schwartz
- James L. Seawright
- John F. Simon Jr.
- Steina
- Mika Tajima
- Tamiko Thiel
- Cheyney Thompson
- Joan Truckenbrod
- Siebren Versteeg
- Lawrence Weiner