What??s Hot in the Art World? Algorithms
Source: Robert Lee Hotz
A printout of code for a computer system developed in the 1960s by MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson sold at an art algorithm auction in March. ENLARGE
In March, Daniel Benitez, a cinema executive in Miami, paid $2,500 for a necktie. It wasn’t just any strip of designer neckwear. Imprinted on the blue silk were six lines of computer code that once brought the motion picture industry to its knees.
To the unschooled eye, the algorithm script on the tie, known formally as “qrpff,” looks like a lengthy typographical error.
But to Mr. Benitez and other computer cognoscenti, the algorithm it encodes is an artifact of rare beauty that embodies a kind of performance art. He framed it.
The algorithm sets out a procedure for what copyright holders once deemed a criminal act: picking the software lock on the digital scrambling system that Hollywood uses to protect its DVDs. At the turn of the century, hackers encoded it in many ways and distributed them freely―as programs, lines of poetry, lyrics in a rock song, and a square dance routine. They printed it on T-shirts and ties, like the item Mr. Benitez purchased. They proclaimed it free speech. No matter how many times the entertainment industry sued, their lawyers found the algorithm as hard to eradicate as kudzu.
Now it is exhibit A in the art world’s newest collecting trend.
Dealers in digital art are amassing algorithms, the computerized formulas that automate processes from stock-market sales to social networks.
In March, the online art brokerage Artsy and a digital code gallery called Ruse Laboratories held the world’s first algorithm art auction in New York. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where the auction was held as a fundraiser, is assembling a collection of computer code. In April, the Museum of Modern Art convened a gathering of computer experts and digital artists to discuss algorithms and design.
It is a small step for technology but a leap, perhaps, for the art world. “It is a whole new dimension we are trying to grapple with,” said curatorial director Cara McCarty at the Cooper Hewitt museum. “The art term I keep hearing is code.”
There’s the rub. Computer buffs may thrill to an antique abacus or the motherboard from a vintage Apple II. Last month, one enthusiast paid more than $1 million for a notebook of notations about thinking machines that belonged to computer pioneer Alan Turing.
An algorithm, though, is an unusually abstract expression of computing’s abstract art.
Simply put, an algorithm is a procedure for a process, which can be expressed in a variety of computer languages.
Algorithms rank Web pages, orchestrate ride-sharing, analyze human genes, and catalog the stars, to name just a few functions.
In the eye of the right beholder, an algorithm can be elegant or convoluted, straightforward or stylish. But when a digital computer translates a program like qrpff into code that the machine can process, it all becomes zeros and ones.
“It is not quite design; it is not quite art,” said Ruse co-founder Fernando Cwilich Gil. “It’s invisible, conceptual, kinetic. An algorithm is unique.”
To give collectors something to show for their money, people who sell digital art strive for creative ways to make an algorithm tangible.
When Mr. Benitez, chief technology officer of Bardan Cinema, purchased the computer program qrpff, he actually got the tie, a commemorative tablet, and a password to access the code at an online software repository.
Another collector at the Artsy auction bought the compatibility calculator used by the online dating site OkCupid. He received two mathematical interpretations of the algorithm drawn on paper and autographed by the four company founders, but no legal right to use or see actual working code.
Indeed, no one yet is really sure what collectors ought to receive when they acquire an algorithm for art’s sake―source code, memorabilia, intellectual property rights, or a right to the output of the procedure. It varies depending on the legal status of the algorithm.
“Software is eating the world,” said digital designer Chris Maury at Pittsburgh-based Conversant Labs, who recently sold a computer vision algorithm at the auction. “The art world is the next part to be eaten.”
For Sebastian Chan, director of digital & emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt museum, an algorithm is the essence of 21st-Century design.
Several of the museum’s showpieces are the products of computer-aided design, but the museum didn’t acquire its first computer code until 2013, when Mr. Chan and his colleagues added an iPad music player called Planetary to the collection. Designed in 2011 by Bloom Studio Inc. in San Francisco, the player displays musicians as stars and their albums as orbiting planets. It has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times.
To make it a suitable museum piece, though, Mr. Chan revised his notions of what constitutes a collectible.
“We acquired it as an idea, rather than as a thing,” said Mr. Chan.
To capture the design process, they acquired not only the finished program, but also all its development versions. “We have all the bug reports, all the developer chat, and all the modifications in the code as they were writing it.”
MIT student Keith Winstein and his friend Marc Horowitz weren’t thinking about art in 2001 when they wrote qrpff at the height of courtroom disputes over enforcement of commercial copy-protection encryption of digital videos.
For them, the code was a form of civil disobedience. They didn’t invent the DVD descrambling procedure, called DeCSS, that they used, nor were they the only programmers at the time who encoded it in some form. In fact, there were at least 42 versions in circulation. Millions of people have downloaded it in one form or another.
“The keen variation we came up with is to make it as short as possible,” said Dr. Winstein, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is now a computer scientist at Stanford University. They rewrote it 77 times, condensing the algorithm from several hundred lines of code down to just six.
To protest copyright restrictions, digital activists printed the qrpff code on coffee mugs and clothing. One group silk-screened it on 100 blue ties. It was the only version of the descrambling algorithm small enough to fit.
Earlier this year, Dr. Winstein donated his qrpff tie and programming notes for the algorithm auction.
“The beauty of the code is that it is a way of thinking,” said Mr. Benitez. “The tie itself is such a playful touch.”
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