The Blanton Museum of Art Presents a Landmark Exhibition of Digital and New Media Art in Collaboration with Thoma Foundation

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin presents Run the Code: Data-Driven Art Decoded by Thoma Foundation X Blanton Museum of Art, a group exhibition exploring the technologies shaping our time, and how artists use them to create a new visual language that goes beyond its corporate, extractive use. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with—and features works from—the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation in Dallas, which holds one of the most comprehensive private collections of digital and media art. The exhibition is organized by Hannah Klemm, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art with Kathleen Forde, Director and Curator of Media Arts, Thoma Foundation.

“Carl and Marilynn Thoma have helped shape how digital and media art is collected and understood,” said Simone Wicha, Director of the Blanton Museum of Art. “As long-time supporters of the Blanton, we’re proud to bring their visionary collection to Austin, a city that is a leader in innovation and technology. The artists featured in Run the Code creatively turn lines of code into acts of expression, revealing that the digital age, at its best, is still profoundly human.”

Bringing together leading figures in generative and data-driven art—including Refik Anadol, Daniel Canogar, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, teamLab, Siebren Versteeg, Leo Villareal, Marina Zurkow, and others—Run the Code offers a reflection on the ways we use, consume, and respond to current technologies. Through immersive installations, real-time data visualizations, and responsive environments, the exhibition reveals how data-driven art can reflect the unpredictability and emotion of human experience.

“Today’s artists are writing code the way others have handled paint or clay,” said Hannah Klemm, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton. “Their works show that technology can be both analytical and poetic—making visible the patterns, biases, and chaos embedded in the data that shapes our world.”

Organized in five thematic sections—Technological Archaeology, Interactivity, Data-Driven Systems, Remixing Art History, and Landscape Reimagined—Run the Code traces how artists employ digital systems to question authorship, perception, and connection in an information-saturated world.

At the exhibition’s heart is teamLab’s The World of Irreversible Change (2022), a panoramic digital environment that unfolds across a large, freestanding wall in a darkened gallery. Animated figures move through a luminous city that changes with the real time and weather in Austin—its light shifting from dawn to dusk as life continues in endless cycles. Yet when visitors activate the surface, their actions permanently alter the work’s course: everyday calm gives way to conflict, then to destruction, until the city burns and nature slowly reclaims its ruins. Created over five years, The World of Irreversible Change captures the poignancy of our era—an allegory of ecological and social precarity where even digital worlds bear the mark of human intervention.

Other artists explore how algorithms absorb and reinterpret the world around us. Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations – Study 1 (2019) uses a custom AI model trained on thousands of images of Gothic cathedrals to generate endlessly transforming architectures of light and color, visualizing the dreams of a machine. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s works, including Pulse Index (2010), extend this idea of technological embodiment: by capturing visitors’ fingerprints and heartbeats, the artist creates a communal portrait that makes visible the data trails we leave behind.

In dialogue with these generative systems, Madeline Hollander’s Heads/Tails (2020) translates New York traffic patterns into a chorus of flickering headlights and taillights, turning the everyday flow of cars into a collective performance. Siebren Versteeg’s Daily Times (2012) converts the live front page of The New York Times into a continuously evolving abstraction, revealing how information overload can blur into painterly chaos.

As our lives become increasingly defined by automation, Run the Code invites reflection on the human impulse to create, even within the systems that shape us. The exhibition underscores the Blanton’s commitment to presenting art that speaks to the present moment—works that merge technological innovation with timeless questions of imagination, authorship, and connection. In tracing how artists turn lines of code into acts of expression, Run the Code reveals that the digital age, at its best, is still profoundly human.