{"id":3576,"date":"2014-03-11T15:57:42","date_gmt":"2014-03-11T19:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/?p=3576"},"modified":"2014-03-11T15:59:43","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T19:59:43","slug":"photos-from-programs-at-an-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2014\/03\/photos-from-programs-at-an-exhibition\/","title":{"rendered":"Photos from “Programs at an Exhibition”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s some documentation of “Programs at an Exhibition” by Nick Montfort & P\u00e1ll Thayer, an exhibit of five Commodore 64 BASIC programs and five Perl programs at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery,<\/a> March 6-16, 2014.<\/p>\n

\"Exterior\"<\/p>\n

The front of the gallery hosts a Commodore 64 running Nick Montfort’s “After Jasper Johns” (left) and an Intel\/Ubuntu computer running P\u00e1ll Thayer’s “Flag” (right). These two pieces respond to and rework the famous 1954 painting, Flag,<\/i><\/a> which is in the collection of the MoMA. Jasper Johns, we salute you.<\/p>\n

\"Take<\/p>\n

Visitors are invited to take cards with all of the code to the five one-line BASIC programs and the five Perl programs that are running in the gallery. For you online visitors to this documentation, a disk image of the five C64 BASIC programs<\/a> can be downloaded; VICE or another C64 emulator can be used to load, run, list, and modify the five programs on that image. (Except for “Zen for Commodore 64,” the programs do have to be retyped or broken into several lines to be modified.) Also, P\u00e1ll Thayer’s entire Microcodes<\/i> series,<\/a> which includes the exhibited programs and which Thayer began in 2009, is online.<\/p>\n

\"How<\/p>\n

P\u00e1ll Thayer’s “How to explain Perl to a dead hare,” based on the similarly-named 1965 performance by Joseph Beuys.<\/a> The Perl program reads the Perl documentation aloud, one word at a time. The Perl documentation, incidentally, is really quite amusing to listen to.<\/p>\n

\"Erased...\"<\/p>\n

P\u00e1ll Thayer’s “Erased de Kooning” enacts (repeatedly, in this instance) the erasure of one of Willem de Kooning’s drawings<\/a> by Robert Rauschenberg.<\/p>\n

Not shown but also in the exhibit are P\u00e1ll Thayer’s “Seedbed” and “Untitled composition.”<\/p>\n

\"All_5_C64s\"<\/p>\n

Nick Montfort’s five Commodore 64 programs running on five of the taupe keyboard-and-CPU units. Two of the monitors, the smaller ones, are NEC 12″ CRTs; the other three are Commodore 1702 CRT monitors. On the middle display, one of the zip paintings<\/a> generated by “After Barnett Newman” can be seen.<\/p>\n

\"Morellet_and_Johns\"<\/p>\n

On the left, Nick Montfort’s “After Fran\u00e7ois Morellet,” which presents in one-character form all of the paintings that Morellet would have eventually painted if he continued to do other panels in his 1958 “6 r\u00e9partitions al\u00e9atoires de 4 carr\u00e9s noirs et blancs d’apr\u00e8s les chiffres pairs et impairs du nombre Pi.”<\/a> On the right, the instance of Nick Montfort’s “After Jasper Johns” that is running on a CRT monitor.<\/p>\n

As with all of the programs, the complete code is presented along with the work’s title, the year of development, and the aritst’s name. The BASIC programs are also written out in a clearer form, with comments.<\/p>\n

Not shown up close but also in the exhibit, in addition to “After Barnett Newman,” are Nick Montfort’s “Zen for Commodore 64” and “After Damien Hirst.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s some documentation of “Programs at an Exhibition” by Nick Montfort & P\u00e1ll Thayer, an exhibit of five Commodore 64 BASIC programs and five Perl programs at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery, March 6-16, 2014. The front of the gallery hosts a Commodore 64 running Nick Montfort’s “After Jasper Johns” (left) and an Intel\/Ubuntu computer running … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Photos from “Programs at an Exhibition””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,143,69,110,144,15],"class_list":["post-3576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-art","tag-boston","tag-commodore-64","tag-exhibit","tag-perl","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3576"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3595,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576\/revisions\/3595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}