Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018

Sept 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences. Featuring works drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Programmed looks back at predecessors of computational art and shows how the ideas addressed in those earlier works have evolved in contemporary artistic practices. At a time when our world is increasingly driven by automated systems, Programmed traces how rules and instructions in art have both responded to and been shaped by technologies, resulting in profound changes to our image culture.

The exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of Digital Art, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research, with Clémence White, curatorial assistant.

Please be warned this exhibition includes video and projection with a flashing light effect.

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 is sponsored by Audi

Major support is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Generous support is provided by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, the Korea Foundation and the Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Hearst.

In-kind support is provided by the Hakuta Family.

       

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Signal, Sequence, Resolution:
Realities Encoded

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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.

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Mendi + Keith Obadike, The Interaction of Coloreds, 2002

A grid of four images showing people's hands, elbows, and hair.
A grid of four images showing people's hands, elbows, and hair.

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

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Essay

Histories of the Digital Now

By Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of digital art

Walk into any given gallery or museum today, and one will presumably encounter work that used digital technologies as a tool at some point in its production, whether videos that were filmed and edited using digital cameras and post-production software, sculptures designed using computer-aided design, or photographs as digital prints, to name just a few examples.

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Audio guides

TV screens stacked on top of each other with faces.
TV screens stacked on top of each other with faces.

Nam June Paik (1932-2006), Fin de Siècle II, 1989. Seven-channel video installation (partially restored), 207 televisions, sound, 168 × 480 × 60 in. (426.7 × 1219.2 × 152.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Laila and Thurston Twigg-Smith 93.139. © Nam June Paik Estate

“The hope was for me as an artist to lose control, and to have my control exist at the level of setting up the experiment.” —Ian Cheng

Hear directly from artists and curators on selected works from Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018.

View guide

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 61 works

In the News

"How Artists Made Code Their Paintbrush"
—Science Friday

"Tamiko Thiel’s 'Unexpected Growth' is an augmented reality installation on the future of oceans and climate change."
—Hyperallergic

"The exhibit uses the Whitney’s own collection to explore how computational art has evolved and changed over the decades based on technology."
—Smithsonian

"Is a particularly urgent, relevant exhibition and a perfect setting in which to consider some of the most pressing questions of our time.”
—Sotheby’s Museum Network

"Programmed explores the limits of code-based art, looking at past generations of computational art and illustrating how the ideas of earlier works have developed to form new contemporary styles.”
—SVA NYC

“From early mathematical works, to Generative art, to digital art in a variety of media, the works in Programmed take many forms.”
—Art and Object 

"Artists play and experiment with algorithms and technology, working within limits but achieving effects greater than the sum of their codes or instructions. The duality at play in this exhibition is as separable as the wave and particle natures of light. To recognize only one explanation would be reductive; to see both is beautiful.”
—Scientific American

“Paik captured both the allure and the futility of following events that happen so quickly they don't register before they're outdated.”
—Forbes

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.