Software of the Earth

A decade after Software, Jack Burnham wrote of his experience curating the exhibition in the essay “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed.” The article documents a number of logistical, technological, and, even, metaphysical reasons for why Software and other technological-minded exhibitions were perceived as “failures” at the time. Within art history, the reception of Software has remained largely unchanged since Burnham’s essay: major narratives focus on the relative success and failure of art and technology projects from this time. In so doing, other possible narratives, themes, and genealogies have been eclipsed.

In this paper, I explore one of the “minor” narratives of Software: ecology. Individual works, installation design, and catalog essays provide evidence of a particularly ecological understanding of information transmission. Works that fall into this category include artist Donald Burgy’s “Order Idea 4,” which focuses on the expansive temporal range of energy transformation across the universe, and Les Levine’s “Systems Burn-off X Residual Software,” which links together organic and artificial elements through their genesis in the physical Earth and further transformation by the human body.

In contemporary art, ecological understandings of the relationship between art, media, and the physical Earth have proven fairly common as well. By exploring this “minor” narrative of Software, we can begin to construct a genealogy surrounding the particular structure of art concerned with the physical and technological underpinnings of software, both then and now.