| > or at least of nothing that I would consider as art That probably is part of the problem here. For starters, you could try looking into Jeffrey Shaw & Gideon May. Netochka Nezvanova is another name that springs to mind (but that likely will not qualify by some of your criteria), the Electronic Disturbance Theater is another. There are probably 100's if not 1000's of artists that have chosen to use the computer as their medium of choice, usually they don't make the code central to the expression because the code is the vehicle. But there are definitely artists that craft with the code as their central means of expression. I feel that by first stating something overbroad and now redefining it in a way that is overly narrow to then be able to say that 'see, nobody fits the exact same niche' is a bit of a cheap trick, after all, _why was just _why, unique, like every other artist. So no, if you keep on adding conditions why nobody was like him or even crafting 'art' you can easily exclude the rest of the world and maintain your claim. But that's a pretty limiting act and it seems like a very technical way to win the argument. _why was neither the first, the last or particularly special in what he did unless you mean special to be used as 'specific' rather than as a claim to quality. He successfully promoted himself, his art and incidentally the ruby language. But that does not warrant such overbroad claims as were made above. |
Regarding the artists you selected, I am not familiar with all their major works and I will definitely look into their artworks more thoroughly later, but at first glance all of them can be categorized as Audi-Visual-Software art / Internet art / political activism using code as art / etc. Put differently, I could imagine seeing all of them in connection with the Ars Electronica selection for example. Would you really label _why with any of these genres? Or suggest that his work might fit in the Prix Ars Electronica categories? To me his work has a very distinct feel from all the artists you listed and belongs in a different genre. I tried to capture this distinct quality in my above definition, where the most important aspect is definitely that the art must be "about software" (and more specifically about code). His works are all much more introspective than what I have seen elsewhere.
The best allegory that springs to mind is this: While other artists often used code ingeniously to look at many different aspects of technology & culture, _why was the first artist who used code to look back at code and its development process itself and also necessarily the developer cultures around it. This is probably also one reason why he was so tied to the Ruby community. I could understand if you find this definition to be too narrow, but to me this "closing of the loop", this self reference is a very distinct quality.