Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018
| November 21, 2018 | |
| September 28, 2018 – April 14, 2019 | |
| Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014 | |
| Josef Albers, Jim Campbell, Sol DeWitt, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Siebren Versteeg | |
| Digital & Media Art |
The Thoma Foundation has provided support for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new exhibition Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018. Curated by our 2016 Arts Writing Award recipient Christiane Paul with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Clémence White, Programmed establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over 50 years of conceptual, video, and computational art. More than 50 artworks by 39 artists are on view, exploring, as Connor Goodwin notes in Blouin Artinfo, “the spectrum between human will and algorithms, between paralyzing open networks and generative constraints.”
Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, all of the pieces in the exhibition are “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code. Together, they reveal the ways in which ideas in early conceptual works have evolved in contemporary artistic practices. At a time when our world is increasingly driven by automated systems, Programmed traces how rules and instructions in art have both responded to and been shaped by technologies, resulting in profound changes to our image culture.
Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 is on view from September 28, 2018 to April 14, 2019. Read more about this exhibit in The Artist as Coder: the Whitney Looks at Programming in Art. 
