How Software Becomes Social

Social Codes curator Casey Reas on code as a creative medium, how artists are using social media as an extended studio, and what’s still possible for exhibiting art online.

This conversation happened on February 15, 2021 between Casey Reas—the curator of Social Codes, who is also Feral File’s co-founder—and editor Willa Köerner.

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What’s the main idea behind the first exhibition on Feral File, Social Codes—which you also curated?

Social Codes is an exhibition featuring ten software artists who have pioneered an iterative way of working on the internet by using it to share work, sketch ideas, show their process, and find community. The featured artists have backgrounds in the sciences, in design, and of course, in art. But what they have in common is that they’ve all found a home for their work online.

The internet is able to bring together fringes of the art world. While there may not be enough energy in a local community to form a group of artists interested in art and software, internationally, coming together online as an aligned artist community works really well, and it has for over 20 years. People find each other through online forums, and through social media. In this way, a vibrant artist community that’s dispersed around the world has been able to congeal.

What are some of the main concepts and questions that these artists are exploring in their work?

Every one of the featured artists has a unique way of working, and their own set of questions that they’re exploring. The thing that ties them together, besides that they’re all working online, is that they are all writing their own code, and working in software. When you create software, the work has a way of growing and evolving on its own terms. So a lot of these artists are exploring permutation, and thinking about systems and modes of simulation.

How do you think these kinds of computational approaches play out when they’re brought into a more social context?

One way that I like to think about it is: they’re not artists who work in formal visual abstraction. Rather, they’re artists who make abstractions of how things behave, or how things grow, or how things die. It’s a different kind of abstraction.

The work in Social Codes all tends to explore how pieces and parts fit together, and how things change over time. That’s what software really allows these artists to do: work in a relational way. Things are moving and growing and changing; they’re never the same. An event that happens in a moment is never repeated again. And so it’s really an art of difference. Unlike a lot of other kinds of art, which work to freeze a moment, the art in Social Codes goes against static configuration.

One historical example of how this concept emerged is Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures, where you have a set of pieces that are linked together in a fluid way, and the relationship of each piece to the others is always changing. That’s a good way to think about a physical instance of what’s happening in a lot of these works of software.

Sol LeWitt is also a popular reference among a lot of artists working in software. To paraphrase one of his ideas in a Social Codes context, there’s an idea, or piece of code, that makes the art based on the artist’s instructions.

Are there other noteworthy historical references that Social Codes is building on top of?

I mean, certainly. Artists have been working with code since the mid-1960s; it’s not something that’s new to this moment. As one example, Vera Molnár is a nearly 100-year-old artist working in drawing and concrete visual systems who began to code well into her career as a way of enhancing her work in the studio, since it allowed her to explore more ideas quickly. Nam June Paik is another good example of an artist who invented his own technology in collaboration with others to realize his vision, working with analog video signals.

This makes me want to ask you how you’re thinking about this term “art and technology” today, when almost every artist is using technology in some kind of way.

Software has eaten the world, but there are two different ways of thinking about it. In one way, artists are using software as a replacement for analog media. These artists are using a photo editing program instead of being in the darkroom, or using a vector editing program instead of sitting at the drafting board. That’s using software as a tool.

An important difference for the artists exhibiting work in Social Codes is that they’re all utilizing software as a creative medium. They’re doing things with software that could not be done in any other media, and they’re utilizing its ability to change as a way to choreograph time.

Another distinction to make about works of software is that while they’ll usually have a discreet beginning, oftentimes they have no end. Therefore, these works are in a continuous state of change. In this way, there’s a relationship to the history of performance, and durational performances in particular.

When do you think the concept of viewing art online without the need for a gallery really took hold? How has it evolved over the years?

I actually don’t think it’s fully taken hold yet. But I mean, exhibiting artwork online goes back to the 1990s—really around 1995, when the web started to take off. At that instant, it was possible to create a work and post it to a web server so that instantaneously, anybody in the world who had an internet connection would be able to see it. In that way, the browser became an installation, or became a gallery space. Back then, that was a really radical idea—that you didn’t need to go through institutions or other gatekeepers to be able to have your work out in the world.

In the mid to late 1990s, artists were excited about that, and saw it as a gesture of claiming autonomy. Showing work online enabled them to take control in a way they didn’t have access to before.

I think of web pages and publishing on the web as similar to artist books, which I love. On the one hand, you can look at an artist book or a website as something that is secondary to having a physical exhibition. But I think you can also see a website or an artist book as its own medium, because it can be every bit as important and deep as those other kinds of traditional in-person shows.

How do you think Feral File in particular is evolving the practice of exhibiting art online?

In 2021, most artists have largely stopped creating their own viewing spaces, or their own galleries online. People have grown accustomed to posting their work to these very bland commercial spaces like Instagram, for example. But those platforms create such a constrained environment for expression and for viewing work. Everything’s sort of the same size in an endless scroll, all jumbled together. While Feral File is not a response to Instagram, it is a place for artists to show their work in an intentional way.

Feral File is also a place for curators to express their vision. Every exhibition starts with the curator, who selects the artists and works closely with them. Unlike on Instagram—where you’re looking at work in a mess of advertisements—you can visit Feral File and be in the mindset of looking at art. We want to create an intentional experience, where you go there to look at different artworks that are purposefully placed together, alongside context from the curator who provides insight into the work.

That’s the model that we’re trying to build: A space for artists to have control over how their work is installed and viewed, rather than a place where other entities are able to exploit their work and labor.

Social media has really helped with the problem of discoverability on the web, and it’s enabled us to connect like never before. But in many ways, it’s totally cheapened our ability to appreciate work by artists.

What’s a better metaphor than “a deal with the devil?” The best thing about social media is that you have a huge group of connected people. Over the years, a lot of social media platforms have allowed that large group to form smaller subgroups into communities of interest. A number of good things have come out of that ability, for sure. But a number of nightmares have come out of it too, as we know all too well.

But as I said, there are many good things about social media. When putting this exhibition together, I assembled a huge list of artists in a crowdsourced way, which I think is one of the best uses of Twitter. In a very open way, I asked, “Which artists are working with code and sharing that work online?” From that tweet, we assembled a list of hundreds of artists that people generously recommended over a few-day period. And that list was the starting point for the artists in the show.

That’s a great example of social media being a useful tool. How else are the artists in Social Codes using social media advantageously?

A number of the artists in the show have a practice that they call “dailies,” where they have a routine of posting something new to social media every day. I think the fact that they’re posting work publicly is a big motivation to keep making new things each day. For many of them, this practice has been a very generative, positive thing.

A number of the artists in Social Codes have also mentioned that the kinds of feedback they receive through social media can be very valuable and enriching for their work. It can also be infuriating, but despite the drawbacks, I’ve seen many of their practices evolve quickly over the last few years, in part thanks to this practice of posting work, getting feedback, and developing a community around it.

As one more example, Andrew Benson has been using social media as an extended studio for years. He’s very personal on Twitter, and just sort of throws ideas out. He’s never had a studio space, so he’s always working from home, and for him, Twitter has become a space to exchange ideas with other people, sort of as a proxy studio.

That’s interesting. I’ll bet a lot of these artists might not have studios, since they primarily work at their computer, maybe just at a desk. Actually, that seems like it touches on one of the biggest challenges with making and viewing art online: it’s not a special, sacred space. Walking into a gallery or studio, you know it’s a special space for art instantly. How do we create online experiences that make the art feel special?

I’m hoping that the way we’ve built the Feral File gallery—with a mode where the artwork takes over the screen, and where people can move back and forth between the works—we can slow down and allow people to enter the frame of mind needed to really view and appreciate the work.

But at the same time, the work on Feral File doesn't need to remain online. When someone collects a work, they can download it and install it wherever they want and have a different kind of experience outside of the browser. That’s a really important point for me: Feral File doesn’t limit the viewing experience to the browser. A museum could collect one of the works on Feral File and install it properly in their gallery. Honestly, I hope that will happen.