Introduction

Christiane Paul: I'm Christiane Paul, the Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum.

Programmed, essentially, addresses two notions of the program. One more in terms of code and algorithms, the way we would understand it as programmed in digital terms. The other idea of the program behind the show is that of the television program, and it's equipment, and signal, and also the manipulation of image sequences.

What is important about Programmed is that all of the works in the exhibition actually address the idea that they are programmed and based on instructions and rules. We typically understand programmed as a digital phenomenon these days, but what we want to make clear here is that there is a long history of instruction and rule-based art that is programmed.