Software art
art genre
Software art is a work of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software art has attained growing attention since the late 1990s. It is closely related to Internet art since it often relies on the Internet, most notably the World Wide Web, for dissemination and critical discussion of the works. Art festivals such as FILE Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo), Transmediale (Berlin), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz) and readme (Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus, and Dortmund) have devoted considerable attention to the medium and through this have helped to bring software art to a wider audience of theorists and academics.
Selection of artists and works
Scott Draves is best known for creating the Electric Sheep program in 1999, the Bomb visual-musical instrument in 1995, and the Fractal flame algorithm in 1992.
Robert B. Lisek is the creator of NEST, a software made to find hidden patterns and links between people, groups, objects, events and places, based on LANL's and GRU's antiterrorist software.
Bob Holmes is an artist who creates websites that are signed, exhibited and sold in galleries and Museums as autonomous artworks.
Netochka Nezvanova is the author of nebula.m81, an experimental web browser awarded at Transmediale 2001 in the category "artistic software". She is also the creator of the highly influential nato.0+55+3d software suite for live video manipulation.
Marc Lee is an artist who focuses on software art, awarded in the categories "Interaction" and "Software" at Transmediale 2002 and won Viper International awards 2002 and 2005.
“Software art” enters the record as art genre. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Software and genre can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Software art” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Software and genre provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2864686. The first chronological checks are 1999, 1995, 1992 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Software art” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.