Intro

Histories & Futures explores contemporary forms of cultural and technological production – using ‘software art’ as a case study.

This evokes a previous discussion around the impact of new technology on the conventions of art:
‘Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to film’ (Benjamin 1999: 220).

The module focuses on ‘software art’ as an emergent practice that appears to exemplify both a technical and cultural processes. It emphasises that software is not merely functional but can have poetic qualities, and political significance. Whether software art is art or not is simply the wrong question to ask (as Benjamin suggests in the above quote).

This recent attention to software art is partly due to a range of cultural events that grant critical attention to the materiality of code, and drawing attention to the structures of programming that lie behind the work. This is part of a historical lacunae that has tended to overlook the material and aesthetic aspects of software, and recognise that programming code is inevitably a significant part of all art that is digitally produced.