Open Codes – Browser-based

A handful of works are featured on the ZKM website only, not in the exhibition space. Some of them use code not only as their material but also as their concept; some are related to topics which are discussed by the exhibition under the hashtags #MachineLearning or #GeneticCode.

Born-digital artistic production, accessible on the Internet, one would label »net art«, or if established as »net.art«, although it is perceived already by its community as a historical genre, declared »dead« in 1999.[1] Net.art in its originality, with its low-tech aesthetic and often anarchic forms, may very well be history already, but browser-based critical art projects are being produced ever since then, evolving with the Internet and the issues it throws up, such as online bots, social media platforms, viruses, or the corporate hegemony of Google, to name just a few.

An Internet browser is the natural habitat for the examples of artistic, as well as scientific productions, featured by Open Codes Browser-based, whether they were published to engage a community and develop a virtual living being on open source basis (Open Worm), to predict often absurd future trajectories for art, based on recent online public discourse (Predictive Art Bot), or to depict landscapes of the early twenty-first century (Indirect Flights).

The genealogy and contemporary social impact of computing can’t be discussed without the Internet, or without the artworks emerging from it. They expand the exhibition space to an impalpable virtual sphere, which is gaining gradually in importance.