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Instrumental Relations: Software As Art, Art As Software, Brogan S. Bunt

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

Software art is characterised by a close concern with the culture of software and the medium of programming. This inevitably demands an engagement with the terrain of the instrumental; software is a sphere of tool-making and programming is governed by conceptions of functional (and generic) utility. Yet where does this leave art? If, in Kantian terms, art is defined by its uselessness (by its lack of any externally grounded necessity) and if, in classical critical theoretical terms, this alienation from function opens up a space of critique, then how can art explore and participate within the instrumental without abandoning its …