Software art is a work of art where the creation of

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software art has attained growing attention since the late 1990s. It is closely related to Internet art since it often relies on the Internet, most notably the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

, for dissemination and critical discussion of the works. Art festivals such as FILE

Electronic Language International Festival The Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica (FILE; English: Electronic Language International Festival) is a New media art festival that usually takes place in three cities of Brazil: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre and it has ...

(São Paulo),

Transmediale Transmediale, stylised as transmediale is an annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, usually held over five days at the end of January and the beginning of February. Transmediale takes the form of a conference (sometimes called ...

(Berlin),

Prix Ars Electronica The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the best known and longest running yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) ...

(Linz) and

readme In software development, a README file contains information about the other files in a directory or archive of computer software. A form of documentation, it is usually a simple plain text file called README, Read Me, READ.ME, README.TXT, R ...

(Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus, and Dortmund) have devoted considerable attention to the medium and through this have helped to bring software art to a wider audience of theorists and academics.

Selection of artists and works

Scott Draves Scott Draves is the inventor of Fractal Flames and the leader of the distributed computing project Electric Sheep. He also invented patch-based texture synthesis and published the first implementation of this class of algorithms. He is also a ...

is best known for creating the

Electric Sheep Electric Sheep is a volunteer computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver. Process The process is transparent to the casual user, w ...

in 1999, the Bomb visual-musical instrument in 1995, and the

Fractal flame Fractal flames are a member of the iterated function system class of fractals created by Scott Draves in 1992. Draves' open-source code was later ported into Adobe After Effects graphics softwareChris Gehman and Steve Reinke (2005). ''The Sharp ...

algorithm in 1992. * Robert B. Lisek, creator o
NE5T
– Citizens Intelligent Agency and GGGRU worm, datamining software for searching hidden patterns and links between people, groups, objects, events, places /based o
LANL
s and

GRU The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, rus, Гла́вное управле́ние Генера́льного шта́ба Вооружённых сил Росси́йской Федера́ци ...

's antiterrorist software * Bob Holmes is an artist who creates websites that are signed, exhibited and sold in galleries and Museums as autonomous artworks. * Netochka Nezvanova is the author of nebula.m81, an experimental web browser awarded at

2001 in the category "artistic software". She is also the creator of the highly influential nato.0+55+3d software suite for live video manipulation. *

Jason Salavon Jason Salavon (born 1970) is an American contemporary artist. He is noted for his use of custom computer software to manipulate and reconfigure preexisting media and data to create new visual works of fine art. Early life The son of an artist, ...

is known for the creation of "amalgamations" that average dozens of images to create individual, ethereal "archetype" images. *

Alexei Shulgin Alexei Shulgin (russian: Алексей Шульгин; born 1963 in Moscow) is a Russian born contemporary artist, musician, and online curator. Working out of Moscow and Helsinki, Shulgin established the Immediate Photography Group in 1988 an ...

is well known for this 386DX performance group, but is also credited with early software art-inspired creations. * Adrian Ward has won several awards for his Signwave Auto-Illustrator, a

generative art Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that wo ...

graphic design application, which parodies

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...

. * Martin Wattenberg is one of the pioneers of data visualization art, creating works based on music, photographs, and even Wikipedia edits. *

Corby & Baily Tom Corby (born 1966) and Gavin Baily (1970) are two London based artists who work collaboratively using public domain data, climate models, satellite imagery and the Internet. Recent work has focused on climate change and its relationship to tech ...

were early experimenters in this field, producers of th
reconnoitre
web browser which won an honorary mention in the net art section of Ars Electronica in 1999. *

LIA Lia is a feminine given name. In the Spanish-speaking world, it is accented Lía. In America, the name may be a variant of Leah or Lea. Lia may be a diminutive of various names including Julia, Cecilia, Amelia, Talia, Cornelia, Ophelia, Rosal ...

is one of the early pioneers of Software and Net Art. Her website, re-move.org (1999–2003) received an Award of Distinction in the Net Vision/Net Excellence Category of Ars Electronica in 2003.

*DATA browser 02 (2005)
Engineering Culture: On 'The Author as (Digital) Producer'
Autonomedia / Arts Council England. *Barreto, Ricardo and Perissinotto, Paula “the_culture_of_immanence”, in Internet Art. Ricardo Barreto e Paula Perissinotto (orgs.). São Paulo, IMESP, 2002. . *Luining, Peter (2004)
Read_Me 2004.
An extensive review of the Run_Me software art conference/ festival held in Aarhus, Denmark 2004. *Bosma, Josephine (2004)
Constructing Media Spaces
*Broeckmann, Andreas (2006)
Software Art Aesthetics
*Broeckmann, Andreas (2004)
Runtime Art: Software, Art, Aesthetics
* Corby, Tom (2006). "Network Art: Practices and Positions". Routledge, . *Duarte, German A.; ''Fractal Narrative. About the Relationship Between Geometries and Technology and Its Impact on Narrative Spaces''. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. *Thomas Dreher (2005
Konzeptuelle Kunst und Software Art: Notationen, Algorithmen und Codes
(Conceptual Art and Software Art, In German) *

Oliver Grau Oliver Grau (born 24 October 1965) is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Dig ...

''Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion''
MIT-Press/

Leonardo Leonardo is a masculine given name, the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese equivalent of the English, German, and Dutch name, Leonard Leonard or ''Leo'' is a common English masculine given name and a surname. The given name and surname originate ...

Book Series, Cambridge 2003. *Magnusson, Thor (2002).
Processor Art: Currents in the Process Oriented Works of Generative and Software Art
*

Christine Buci-Glucksmann Christine Buci-Glucksmann is a French philosopher and Professor Emeritus from University of Paris VIII specializing in the aesthetics of the Baroque and Japan, and computer art. Her best-known work in English is ''Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics o ...

, "L'art à l'époque virtuel", in Frontières esthétiques de l'art, Arts 8, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004 *Paul, Christiane (2003). ''Digital Art'' (World of Art series). London: Thames & Hudson. {{ISBN, 0-500-20367-9. *

Edward A. Shanken Edward A. Shanken (born 1964) is an American art historian, whose work focuses on the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on experimental new media art and visual culture. Shanken is Professor, Arts Division, at UC Santa Cru ...

. (1998)
"The House that Jack Built – Jack Burnham's Concept of 'Software' as a Metaphor for Art"
Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10. *

(2002)
"Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art"

( Leonardo/ISAT) 35:4: 433–38.
Software Art Andreas Broegger Copenhagen
*Mitchell Whitelaw. Metacreation: art and artificial life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004 *Savli, Ahmet (2019)
"As a new tool of art digital coding and software art"
* Albert, Saul (1999).
Artware
' Computer art Digital art

Selection of artists and works

See also

Further reading