GENERATIVE AND SOFTWARE ART
Generative art defined by Philip Galanter is "art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a computer program which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.
Historical precursors to new media-based forms of generative art are Fluxus projects and Happenings. Fluxus problematized the role of the artist by removing their physical index from the production of the artwork.
Software art as defined by Saul Albert is art that is made from, uses or interrogates software as a cultural form and context.
An important influence to both generative and software art is the free-software movement. Free software and its communities organize around libraries of code or particular projects. In these collaborations the revisions and modifications by varied programmers are incorporated. Linux is a popular open-source operating system they encourage innovation, diversity and collaboration. In comparison proprietary software such as adobe photoshop is closed to modification. Open-source is a bottom up system while proprietary ware is a top down system. Matthew Fuller writes of the need for a collective activity among software engineers, artists and computer users.
Runme.org was developed by a team of artists, programmers and writers. They incorporated downloads, feedback and keyword indexing, they shared art within an artist driven context. Although their projects were diverse together they suggest a growing dominance of functionality, shareware and programming as an art genre.
CODeDOC (2002) was created for the Whitney Artport, curator Christiane Paul sought to represent how different processes of coding conditioned the experience of one idea. 12 artists were commissioned to submit code that "should move and connect three points in space" the code should be the object as opposed to what it produces.
London.pl (2001) by Graham Harwood is a script in Perl (a language designed for processing text), which consists of a program that calculates the collective lung capacity of children in London who have been, in the artists words, "beaten, enslaved, fucked, and exploited to death since 1792 (at the time of Britians Industrial Revolution). The vital statistic is used to time the collective scream of these children to be broadcast in London in hope of redressing "imbalance of imagination and innocence."
Generative art, software art and earlier art practices that changed the relationship between artist and their work of art. They opened up spaces between symbolic, representation, and enactment.
OPEN WORKS
Building on the general knowledge of internet users, such as uploading and downloading, some artists sought to dissolve boundaries between art production and audience.
Communimage (1999) by programmers c a l c and Johannes Gees. This is a collage of graphics uploaded by visitors it offers a large scale, eccentric, visual juxtapositions.
Nine (9) (2003) by Harwood allows users to create simple multimedia knowledge maps that can be linked to those made by other participants. These maps are then accompanied by emails that aim to create connections between users. Named after the life expectancies in Jamaica and Sweden, this project was created in reaction to a social imbalance, being the graphics software, such as photoshop, which are designed almost exclusively for experts.
CRASH OF 2000
By 2000 judging be the numerous emergence of books and courses on net culture online art forms were considered an instructive and vigorous intellectual force in addition many curators took on internet based work.
After the collapse of the stock market in spring 2000 a sense of cynicism about the internet surfaced. The net became tainted by economic failure, demystified hype and market-less ideas. In the first few years of the twenty-first century net art practices moved closer to other cultural fields such as tactical media, free software and film( animation and video).