Sol Lewitt and the art formerly known as new media.
This from Michael Kimmelman'sobit in The New York Times.
Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction "not straight" was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others -- their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever -- remained part of the art.
This apparently clear distinction between art and documentation of an artistic event begins to fray a bit, however, when the art is instruction-based. For instance, Sol Lewitt'sFour Geometric Figures in a Room was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 1984. Technically, the artwork is the following set of instructions:
Four geometric figures (circle, square, trapezoid, parallelogram) drawn with four-inch (10 cm) wide band of yellow color ink wash. The areas inside the figures are blue color ink wash, and the areas outside the figures are red color ink wash. On each side of the walls are bands of India ink wash.
As the contextual information states, Lewitt's instructions are something that "anyone may execute, in any location, any number of times." The parallels to new media art are striking. In a sense, the input is the room's dimensions. The algorithms are Lewitt's instructions, and the output is the drawings on the walls.
Lisa Jevbratt'sThe Stillman Project (1998), was also commissioned for the Walker Art Center but for a virtual "room"--the online Gallery 9. Jevbratt wrote a set of instructions, only they were in a computer language known as javascript. These instructions were placed on every page of the Walker website (in the source code, not visible to the visitor) and caused a number of things to happen when a visitor viewed the website, including, on the first viewed page only, a set of simple questions (each in a different color). Based on how someone answered, they were "tagged," and as they viewed different pages throughout the website, those pages were also tagged with the color of whichever answer the viewer selected. Over time, pages of the website acquired a profile, based on who was looking at them: 30% of the people looking at this page believe the Internet is primarily informational. Etc.
The point is that with all net art and significant aspects of all new media art, as with the Lewitt, the artwork that is collected is the instruction set, and the artwork that is experienced is its execution.
In 1997, John Simon created one of his signature works, Every Icon. The idea is simple enough. Taking a 32 x 32 grid - the standard size for a Mac icon according to Apple's vaunted human-computer interface guidelines - Simon created a Java applet - an algorithm coded in a particular software language or, in other words, a Turing Machine - that causes each square of the grid, serially, to be colored black or white. It progresses by counting. Hence, over time, every single, possible icon will be imaged. You will note, however, that the icon linnked here has been running since 1 minute after midnight on April 9, 1998, and it has only made it to the 36th square. There are approximately 4.3 billion combinations possible along the top row alone. The second row will take roughly 5.85 billion years to compute - your results may vary, depending on the speed of your computer. Simon has calculated that for the icon to turn completely black, its final state, will take several hundred trillion years or, as he puts it, "a very, very long time."
"A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience."
Sol Lewitt
