Software out of context

Both early computers had a loudspeaker meant to signal warnings or a finished program. Geoff Hill pulsed CSIRAC's "hooter" in timed loops so that it played tunes, and it performed "Colonel Bogey" at a Sydney computing conference on 7–9 August 1951. In Manchester, Strachey used the Mark 1's "Hoot" instruction to end his draughts program with "God Save the King", and a BBC recording from autumn 1951 survives.

On the Ferranti Mark 1 at Manchester University, Strachey wrote a program that calculates nothing. It combines words from lists into love letters, each signed "M.U.C." for Manchester University Computer.

For Brookhaven National Laboratory's visitors' day on 18 October 1958, Higinbotham wired a Donner Model 30 analog computer, normally used for trajectory calculations, to an oscilloscope. Visitors played a side-view tennis match with knobs and buttons. The setup was dismantled after two years.

At the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, Lutz programmed a Zuse Z22 to recombine 16 nouns and 16 adjectives from Kafka's The Castle, plus conjunctions and pronouns, into random sentences. The result appeared in the magazine augenblick in autumn 1959. It is one of the first computer-generated literary texts.

Timing the hammer strikes of IBM's high-speed 1403 printer turned it into a crude synthesizer: striking every 1/440 second gives the note A. Decks of punch cards played pop songs. The Computer History Museum holds 1970 recordings and revived the program on its restored 1401 in 2019.

At Bell Labs, colleagues wrote machine-code programs that were loaded into shared memory on an IBM 7090, where they hunted rival programs and copied themselves; an umpire program enforced the rules. The game was published in 1972 and is a precursor of Core War.

In 1952 Henry bought a Sperry bombsight analogue computer from an army-surplus warehouse in Manchester. In 1961 he converted it into a machine that produced abstract drawings. His prize show "Ideographs" opened at the Reid Gallery, London, on 30 August 1962, one of the earliest exhibitions of machine-made art.

On the PDP-1 at MIT, a group of young programmers turned one of the first interactive computers with a vector screen into a two-player spaceship fight with gravity and a star field. Russell wrote the first version in 1961–62, and others added the accurate star map and the sun's gravity in spring 1962. It became the standard demonstration program for showing what the PDP-1 could do and spread to installations across the US.

Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA's psychotherapist script at MIT partly to show that communication between human and machine is superficial. Users, including his own secretary, confided in it anyway, and psychiatrists proposed automated therapy. The reaction turned him into one of computing's sharpest critics.

Two Bell Labs researchers scanned a photograph of the dancer Deborah Hay and had a computer rebuild it from small symbols acting as grey tones. They hung the 12-foot print in their director's office as a joke, and he had it taken down. It then appeared in the New York Times in October 1967 and at MoMA in 1968.

Two Princeton students invented a language meant to share nothing with any other major language. The compiler rejects programs that say PLEASE too rarely, as impolite, or too often, as grovelling. INTERCAL anticipated the later scene of esoteric programming languages.

The Altair 8800 kit had no screen or speaker, but it disturbed nearby radios. Dompier wrote loops that shaped this interference into notes, and on 16 April 1975 the box played the Beatles through a transistor radio at the Homebrew Computer Club.

Atari did not credit its programmers, so Robinett hid a secret room reading "Created by Warren Robinett" in the Atari 2600 game Adventure. A 15-year-old player found it and wrote to Atari. The company kept the room and started calling such features "Easter eggs".

At the MIT AI Lab, Stallman and colleagues were refused the source code for a newly installed Xerox 9700 laser printer, so they could not add the jam alerts they had built for the old printer. Stallman announced the GNU project in September 1983.

Crackers who stripped copy protection from games signed their work with short animated intros with scrollers and music, first on the Apple II and then on the C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Amiga. Coders began making intros without any crack, purely to show skill, and the practice detached into the demoscene.

Dutch broadcaster NOS had been sending programs by radio since 1979 and in 1980 its show Hobbyscoop launched BASICODE, a common BASIC subset that many home computers could load. Listeners recorded the broadcast tones on cassette and loaded them into their machines. The scheme spread to the GDR, where programs were broadcast until about 1992.

The B-side of Chris Sievey's single held three ZX81 programs stored as audio tones, including the game Flying Train. The third program was an animated video meant to be run on the ZX81 while the A-side played. It was billed as the world's first computer promo.

A ZX Spectrum text adventure about the band was pressed as a flexi disc and given away on the cover of Computer and Video Games issue 36. Readers played the record into a cassette recorder to load the game. It is one of a handful of games distributed on grooved discs.

Wim van Eck published a paper showing that the electromagnetic emissions of video display units can be received and reconstructed at a distance. The technique became known as van Eck phreaking. It is the background for later programs that make monitors transmit on purpose.

A German developer wrote Ultimate Soundtracker as a tool for making Amiga game music, using the machine's four sound channels and 15 samples per song. Scene coders soon disassembled and rewrote it, producing Soundtracker II, NoiseTracker (1989) and ProTracker (1991). Its MOD file format became a standard for music in the demoscene and beyond.

RealSound used pulse-width modulation to play 6-bit digitised speech and music on the basic IBM PC speaker. It first shipped in World Class Leader Board and Echelon in 1988. The method was patented as US 5,054,086.

The Atari ST's video chip draws a fixed border around a 320x200 picture that software was not supposed to touch. Demo coders found that switching display frequency or resolution at exactly the right CPU cycle made the chip draw graphics into the border; TNT Crew's demo is credited with first opening the left border. The Union Demo (1989) is described as the first ST screen with no borders at all.

In the font's PostScript code, the standard "lineto" and "curveto" commands are replaced by a custom "freakto" function. Each letter is deformed at random every time it is printed, so no two prints are alike. The later OpenType version imitates this with six pre-randomised variants per glyph.

On 25 August 1991, a Helsinki student told the comp.os.minix newsgroup he was writing a free operating system, "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu". That project became Linux.

Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby,
won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486)
AT clones.

During residencies at the Louis Pasteur Atelier in Arbois and the Saline Royale in France, Nechvatal let computer viruses infect and gradually corrupt digital image files. The corrupted images were then painted onto canvas by robot. The Computer Virus Project II with Stéphane Sikora followed in 2002.

Future Crew's demo won the PC demo competition at Assembly 1993 in Finland, running real-time 3D graphics and music on a 486 PC with a sound card. Slashdot readers voted it one of the Top 10 Hacks of All Time in 1999. Its source code was later released into the public domain on GitHub.

In the browser the page looks like unreadable green code on black. "View source" reveals a diagram of a nuclear bomb drawn in code characters, so the inspection tool becomes the place where the work happens.

In this browser story about a couple reunited after a war, each click splits the window into smaller nested frames. A page-layout feature becomes the cut of a nonlinear film.

etoy redirected people searching popular keywords to its own pages, which told them they had been hijacked. The action won the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for WWW in 1996.

An artist-made browser, offered as an alternative to Netscape and Internet Explorer, that throws away page layout. It shows instead the link structure between pages and streams of text.

Clips from the Lumière brothers, Battleship Potemkin, King Kong, Psycho and Star Trek are converted into moving ASCII characters, green on black like an old terminal.

The user enters any URL, and a script shreds the page's HTML before the browser renders it, scattering text, images and code into large compositions. Napier calls the result an "action painting" of the web and names Web Stalker as an influence.

An old 386 PC plays MIDI versions of rock hits while song-synthesis software sings the vocals, billed as a "cyberpunk rock band". It is in the Garage Museum collection in Moscow.

FloodNet was a Java applet that made participants' browsers reload a target site over and over. It was used in solidarity with the Zapatistas, among others against the Mexican president's website, and staged at Ars Electronica 1998.

Natural Selection sat on top of other search engines and passed through only their URLs. Searches on race or eugenics terms led users into a network of sites Mongrel built to play with racist expectations.

JODI hacked Wolfenstein 3D via its Spear of Destiny add-on and replaced the dungeon textures with geometric black, white and grey forms. The game space becomes a disorienting, almost unnavigable abstraction.

When the toy retailer eToys sued the art group etoy over its domain name, etoy turned the dispute into an online game with recruited agents. eToys dropped the lawsuit in early 2000.

Leandre hacked a commercial racing game so that its physics and graphics fall apart and the cars float through abstract space. It was listed for the transmediale.02 software art award.

In this Half-Life mod the player faces many identical copies of a man in white and can only shoot them. The spreading blood turns the game into a kind of painting.

For three years the artists' entire home computer, including e-mail and bank statements, could be browsed online in real time ("file sharing = life sharing"). It went offline in 2003, and Rhizome restored an archive.

Approaching retirement, Horiuchi began painting detailed rural landscapes with Excel's AutoShape tools. Excel was already installed and graphics software was expensive. He won first prize in the Excel Autoshape Art Contest in 2006.

During the 2000 US presidential election the site offered voters the chance to sell their votes to the highest bidder. It led to injunctions, domain shutdowns and coverage on CNN.

The German group farbrausch won the 64k intro competition at The Party 2000 with a real-time animated film whose program is no larger than 64 kilobytes. Instead of storing images and sound, the program generates textures, 3D scenes and synthesised music at run time.

A working parody of commercial design software whose tools behave semi-autonomously. It co-won the transmediale.01 "Artistic Software" award on 10 February 2001 and released its first public beta on 28 February 2001.

Lehni began Scriptographer in 2001: a JavaScript plug-in that made Illustrator programmable. It debuted publicly in 2002 as the software driving Hektor, a spray-can drawing machine. Scriptographer stopped working with Adobe CS6 in 2012, and its successor Paper.js launched in 2011.

A self-replicating Python virus was released at the Slovenian Pavilion on the opening day of the Venice Biennale, 6 June 2001. Its source code was printed on t-shirts and the virus was sold as an artwork.

Named after the FBI's email wiretap program, Carnivore is a packet sniffer that passes live network traffic to artist-made clients, which turn it into images and sound. It received an honorary mention at read_me 1.2 in 2002.

The program draws patterns on a monitor so that its emissions play tones on a nearby AM radio. It was named after Beethoven's Für Elise, the tune used to test it. It built on Pekka Riikonen's earlier tempest-AM.

Arcangel rewrote a hacked Super Mario Bros. cartridge to erase everything except the scrolling clouds. The NES becomes an ambient landscape projector.

JODI filmed their own frantic use of the Mac OS 9 desktop. What looks like system failure is user behaviour. The four-channel video is in MoMA's collection.

Jaromil wrote the 13-character shell line that makes a UNIX system copy itself until it freezes, and presented it as code poetry. He also printed it on t-shirts and painted it on walls.

McLean's Perl script fills the machine with copies of itself and prints the process as a pattern of bits until the computer stalls. It was in the transmediale.02 software art award listing and is widely cited as the winner.

The museum showed computer viruses, their history and the aesthetics of their code as cultural objects from May to 13 June 2002. The show was part of the digitalcraft project and was sponsored by the antivirus company Symantec.

The artists made and collected anti-war spray images for Counter-Strike, which players shot onto the game's walls instead of bullets. The project was shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Launched in May 2003, the site invites designers to submit stylesheets for one and the same HTML file, so separating content from form becomes a shared game. It was inspired partly by Chris Casciano's "Daily CSS Fun" experiment.

Byrne used PowerPoint's charts, arrows and bullet points as artistic material: "bar charts gone awry", arrows pointing nowhere. The result was published by Steidl in September 2003 as a book with a DVD, and the first printing sold out by mid-December.

runme.org launched in January 2003 as an open, tagged repository where anyone could submit software art. It grew out of the read_me festivals.

An info container and website announced that Vienna's Karlsplatz would be renamed Nikeplatz and get a giant swoosh monument. Nike threatened legal action against the fake campaign.

A 21-year-old student sold a 1000×1000-pixel homepage at $1 per pixel and grossed $1,037,100. Today it doubles as a monument to link rot: by 2017, 547 of 2,816 original links were dead.

Hidden websites run Google AdSense ads, and the income buys Google shares for "Google To The People Public Company". Google slowly pays for its own takeover.

Live search terms typed by people around the world appear in real time on a station-style flap display. The work turns private searching into a public announcement.

On 7 July 2006, at the Quarantaine bookshop in Brussels, OSP made a booklet in public, "How To Print A Booklet In 19 Easy Steps", using only free software and showing every detour. Kate Rich mixed Open Cola cocktails and a DJ played.

From March 2006, DeLappe logged into America's Army and, instead of playing, typed into the game chat the names of US service members killed in Iraq. By September 2006 he had entered 1,273 names, often to hostile replies.

A life-size red Google Maps pin stands at the exact spot Google marks as a city's centre, turning a "15-pixel computer icon" into an object. Versions followed in Berlin, Taipei, Arles, Kassel and, permanently, Arnsberg (2019).

The avatar artist Gazira Babeli used scripts to make pizzas fly, giant soup cans attack and self-replicating objects take over in Second Life. She released her code under a Creative Commons licence.

Each large print is a single mouse drag of a default Photoshop gradient. The title records the recipe: settings and mouse coordinates, so anyone could in principle repeat the work.

A Twitter bot posted every word of an English word list, one at a time, for seven years: about 109,000 posts to about 95,000 followers. Single words became accidental commentary when retweeted in context.

Rafman screenshots strange scenes captured automatically by Google Street View's nine-lens cameras. He circulates them as blogs, books and prints in the tradition of street photography.

Craft runs on an ATmega88 microcontroller at 20 MHz, a chip with no video or sound hardware. The processor generates the VGA signal in software, timed to the display line by line, and synthesises four-channel audio in the gaps between lines; the serial port is reused to draw high-resolution text. It won the Console / Real Wild competition at Breakpoint 2008.

Elevated is a 4-kilobyte Windows program that generates a camera flight over a mountain landscape, with music, entirely at run time. It was coded by iq and Mentor, with music by Puryx, and won the PC 4k intro competition at Breakpoint 2009.

Huff ran the 100 most-downloaded copyright-free books through Microsoft Word's AutoSummarize, cutting each to ten sentences, and published the results as a book.

An audiovisual performance that mourns the analogue PAL colour standard through video bending and DV-compression artefacts. In the same year Menkman's Glitch Studies Manifesto framed such errors as an aesthetic.

The Google homepage rotates continuously while search still works, set to "Windmills of Your Mind".

The artists e-mailed Bret Easton Ellis's novel to themselves page by page, kept the ads Gmail served next to each page and deleted the text. The 408-page book, published by Traumawien in 2012, has only chapter titles and ads as footnotes.

GML stores graffiti tags as motion data, meaning coordinates and timing, so they can be replayed, analysed or drawn by robots. The spec was opened in 2009 and launched in January 2010.

Asendorf's Processing script sorts the pixels of a photo by brightness along its rows and columns. The streaked images became a widely copied glitch-art style.

The AFRL in Rome, New York, linked 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles with GPUs and servers into a supercomputer of about 500 TFLOPS. It cost about 2 million dollars. The lab called it the fastest interactive computer in the Defense Department.

A device disguised as a plug adapter intercepts traffic in public Wi-Fi hotspots and changes headlines on major news sites. Readers see altered news without knowing it.

Zadrożniak built the first Floppotron in 2011 from two floppy drives controlled by a microcontroller. It plays music through the drives' stepper motors. Later versions added hard drives and scanners, and version 3.0 from 2022 uses 512 floppy drives.

A short program drives a Raspberry Pi GPIO pin from the clock generator at about 100 MHz and modulates it with audio. With a 20 cm wire as antenna the Pi became an FM transmitter with roughly 50 m range. No extra hardware was needed.

For the 2013–14 season, OSP made the theatre's programme as an HTML page and printed it from the browser (html2print), after about 2.5 years of designing Balsamine material with other software. The repository calls it the "first Balsa programme done with a browser".

Soulellis began collecting artists' books printed from the web under the name Library of the Printed Web around 2013, and MoMA Library acquired the collection in January 2017. In 2015 Mandiberg's software set the entire English Wikipedia as 7,473 volumes for print-on-demand; part of it was shown at Denny Gallery, New York (artnet).

In memory of Aaron Swartz, Goldsmith asked the public to print out "the internet" and send it to LABOR, Mexico City, from 26 July to 30 August 2013. About 20,000 contributors sent a reported ten tons of paper, including some 250,000 pages of JSTOR articles.

Kazemi turned National Novel Writing Month around: participants spend November writing code that generates a novel of 50,000+ words and share both. Kazemi's own example: "It could be 50,000 repetitions of the word 'meow'."

From 12 February 2014, viewers' chat commands steered Pokémon Red on a live stream, with up to about 121,000 concurrent participants. The crowd finished the game on 1 March 2014, and Guinness counted 1,165,140 participants.

With $100 in Bitcoin per week, a bot bought one random item from a darknet market and had it shipped to Kunst Halle St. Gallen from October 2014 to January 2015. Its purchases included ten ecstasy pills. Police seized the bot, and the charges were later dropped.

A Chrome extension replaces any web page with flat coloured blocks that follow its layout. Rozendaal later had some of the results woven as Jacquard tapestries.

Researchers showed that malware can make a computer's display cable emit FM radio signals. A nearby phone's FM receiver decodes them, leaking data from an isolated air-gapped machine.

Bad Apple 64 plays the shadow-art music video Bad Apple!! on an unmodified Commodore 64. More than 2000 frames, each compressed to about 70 bytes, fit on one floppy disk and are streamed from it at 12 frames per second.

The font's ligature table maps buzzwords such as "synergy" to a single redaction-bar glyph, so typing them blanks them out. It needs no CSS or JavaScript, "but plain ol' OpenType font technology".

On 1 January 2015 a cyclist in Victoria, BC rode a route that made his Strava map read "Happy 2015". He went on to plan rides, averaging about 70 km each, whose GPS lines form pictures.

8088 MPH runs on the original IBM PC with a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor and a CGA card documented with 16 colours. By abusing the 80x25 text mode and the colour signal of the composite output, it shows 1024 colours and plays four-channel music through the PC speaker. It won the oldskool demo competition at Revision 2015, and no emulator of the time could run it correctly.

Malware changes the speed of a computer's CPU and chassis fans so their noise carries binary data. A nearby phone microphone can receive it at up to 900 bits per hour. The attack works on computers with no speakers.

The program writes to memory in timed patterns so the computer's system bus emits signals an AM radio can pick up, around 1580 kHz on the author's set. It plays simple tunes without any radio hardware. A browser version also exists.

Oliver hid a Raspberry Pi, a BladeRF radio and GSM base-station software inside an HP office printer. It sends nearby phones messages that pretend to come from friends, prints the conversations, and calls phones to play Stevie Wonder.

A Carnegie Mellon student showed a Turing machine built only from PowerPoint's on-click animations, with no macros. He presented it as "On the Turing Completeness of PowerPoint" at the joke conference SIGBOVIK in April 2017.

In March 2017 Goodwin drove from New York to New Orleans while a neural network wrote text in real time from a trunk-mounted camera, a microphone, GPS and the clock, echoing Kerouac. The book was published by Jean Boîte Éditions in 2018.

A Mind Is Born is a 256-byte program for the Commodore 64 that generates both a two-minute piece of music and its synchronised visuals. It won the Oldskool 4K Intro competition at Revision 2017, entered there because no 256-byte category existed. It ends by resetting the computer, so the boot screen becomes part of the piece.

Two Facebook profiles each received ten likes, and a month of the platform's recommendations was archived. Layout scripts set profile 1 always on the left and profile 2 on the right, and the script itself is printed at the end of the book.

Smith hand-types painterly portraits in HTML and CSS, without images or libraries; one runs to 1,968 lines of CSS. Built for Chrome, the works fall apart in other browsers, so the browser becomes part of the piece.

Software for cheap FL2000 USB-to-VGA adapters turns off the blanking intervals and streams raw samples from memory. This turns the adapters into low-cost software-defined radio transmitters. It was released at OsmoDevCon in April 2018.

Weckert pulled 99 second-hand smartphones running Google Maps in a handcart through quiet Berlin streets. Google Maps read them as congestion and turned the empty streets red. The work won a Social Impact Award at the 24th Japan Media Arts Festival.

Banned articles are stored as in-game books in a large Minecraft library, because the game often stays accessible where news sites are blocked. Its wings, mostly one per country, hold around 300 books.

Protesters decorated their Animal Crossing: New Horizons islands with slogans and images mocking Xi Jinping and Carrie Lam. Around 10 April 2020, Chinese platforms removed listings for the game; whether the protest caused the removal is unconfirmed.

Song takes the rule "adapts to any width" literally: an animated portrait folds, squeezes and becomes another face as the window changes. It was documented in February 2020, but no creation year was found.

Finland added the demoscene to its national inventory of living heritage in April 2020, the first country to do so. Germany followed in 2021, then Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, France and Norway, following the UNESCO Convention for intangible cultural heritage.

A Pokémon-style game made entirely of a font: each keypress triggers a ligature substitution that swaps in the next "frame" glyph. It has 4,696 frames and 43 choices, and the game page reads "no javascript, no html, all font".

Area 5150 runs on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC with a CGA card and shows graphics that the original hardware was thought unable to produce. Made largely by the 8088 MPH team, it won the alternative demo competition at Evoke 2022 in Cologne.

HarfBuzz lets fonts run WebAssembly code while shaping text. llama.ttf packs a 15-million-parameter language model into a valid TrueType font, and typing exclamation marks makes the font generate text. Strachey in reverse: the typeface itself writes.

A high-school student used the JavaScript built into the PDF format to run Doom inside a PDF, with a monochrome text-like display. A month later he booted a RISC-V Linux inside a PDF.