The Post-display Condition of Contemporary Computer Art

Recent exhibition attempts to recuperate and revise Conceptual Art — ‘Open Systems’ (2005), ‘Invisible: Art About the Unseen’ (2012) — have brought to the fore wider discursive concerns regarding coding, interfaces and artistic intentionality. Taking its lead from Rosalind Krauss’ seminal work on the post-medium condition, this paper argues that the continued privileging of interface/display-user inherent within artistic discourse belies a more nuanced reading of the critical relationship between artist and code. Furthermore, this paper explores new practices in Computer Art and its related theorisation by Tanaka-Ishii and Dominic Lopes, with a view to re-conceptualising the relationship between artistic intentionality, coding, interface and user input. Based on this re-conceptualisation we identify the ‘postdisplay condition of contemporary computer art’, a condition that neither privileges userdisplay communication, nor the space between code and user, but rather envelopes meaning production between all elements of an artwork.