Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018
Sept 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019
Signal, Sequence, Resolution:
Realities Encoded
6
These artists use programming to adopt a critical stance by underscoring or exposing social, cultural, or political codes. Keith and Mendi Obadike’s project The Interaction of Coloreds, for example, uses a statement by Josef Albers on rules and color as a starting point for exploring how longstanding systems of racial categorization might translate into the digital sphere, specifically how skin color factors into online commerce. Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin’s work reflects on the rules followed by authorities and their resistance while Paul Pfeiffer’s video sculpture addresses cultural and racial identity in sports and Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki’s interactive data visualization explores how Twitter receives and shapes reality television.
Mendi + Keith Obadike, The Interaction of Coloreds, 2002
Mendi + Keith Obadike (Founded 1996), The Interaction of Coloreds, 2002 and 2018. HTML 5. JavaScript. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website AP.2002.7
The Interaction of Coloreds, part of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Black Net.Art Actions, engages with patterns of racial classification on the internet. The artists created the work at a time when online commercial ventures were positioning the internet as a space without prejudice, free from mediation through our physical appearance and therefore devoid of notions of race. Drawing attention to the fact that there still is a strong link between skin color and money in the filtering and tracking involved in online commerce, Mendi + Keith Obadike here create a satirical Color Check System. Billed as the world’s first online skin-color verification system, their website enables the translation of skin tone—as captured in a photo or screenshot—into a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML, the online scripting language, to represent color (#FFFFFF, for example, equals white). Using satire as strategy, the work strives to spur conversations about racial discrimination in internet commerce.
Engage with The Interaction of Coloreds project here.
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