# Framing the (art historical) debate: (Pre-, Post-) Modern? > The history of the digital and computer-aided arts could be told as a history of ignorance against programming and programmers. Computer programs get locked into black boxes, and programmers are frequently considered to be mere factota, coding slaves who execute other artist’s concepts. (Cramer 1) > A computer program is a blueprint and its execution at the same time. Like a pianola roll, it is a score performing itself. [...] Computer programming collapses, as it seems, the second and third of the three steps of concept, concept notation and execution. (Cramer 4) > Contrary to conventional data like digitized images, sound and text documents, the algorithmic instruction code allows a generative process. It uses computers for computation, not only as storage and transmission media. [...] > There is, after all, no such thing as data without programs, and hence no digital arts without the software layers they either take for granted, or design themselves. To discuss “software art” simply means to not take software for granted, but pay attention to how and by whom programs were written. If data doesn’t exist without programs, it follows that the separation of processed “data” (like image and sound files) from “programs” is simply a convention. (Cramer 5) > If software is generally defined as executable formal instructions, logical scores, then the concept of software is by no means limited to formal instructions for computers. (Cramer 5) Work 0: [Sol LeWitt's "Plan for a Concept Art Book"] https://www.sollewittprints.org/artwork/lewitt-raisonne-1971-18/ > The paper argued that any separation of code and the resultant actions would simply limit the aesthetic experience [...] Speech and its repre- sentation in writing together form a language that we appreciate as poetry. In the essay we speculated whether code could be seen to work in a similar way? (Cox et al. 161) > The written form is merely a computer-readable notation of logic, and is a representation of this process. Yet the written code isn’t what the computer really executes, since there are many levels of interpreting and compiling and linking taking place. [...] But software itself relies on the deferred action of its author — the code operates on behalf of the programmer, so it is more accurate to consider this as part of a continuing performance. (Cox et al. 164) > Two basic activities emerge. A person may work "on" the digital or "within" it. In the former, one's attention is directed from the outside in, taking the medium itself as its object, while in the latter one takes the perspective of the medium itself, radiating attention outward to other contexts and environments. To generalize from this, the first position (working "on") is labeled modern or, when applied to art and aesthetics, modernist. And the latter position (working "within") is labeled non-modern, be it premodern, postmodern, or some other alternative (Galloway, 1-2). Work 1: http://㐃.net Work 2: [Ed Atkins, Ribbons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EkqVWXBVOQ) Other works: https://constantdullaart.com/, https://arambartholl.com, > Where does the work reside? (Galloway, 5) > Jodi are thus stubbornly out of step with the dominant rhythms of contemporary art. Less obsessed with the cultural or social effects of new media, Jodi orient themselves toward the specificities of hardware and software. The resulting aesthetic is, in this way, not entirely specified by the artists’ subjective impulses. Instead, the texture of code and computation takes over, and computing itself—its strange logic, its grammar and structure, and often its shape and color—produces the aesthetic. (Galloway 3).