'Software' and Jack Burnham.

Software emphasized the process of audience interaction with "control and communication techniques," encouraging the "public" to "personally respond" and ascribe meaning to experience. In so doing, Software questioned the intrinsic significance of objects and implied that meaning emerges from perception.
http://www.volweb.cz/horvitz/burnham/homepage.html


"Meaning emerges from perception".
I like this. For me this is like saying that everything is without meaning until something interacts with it. Therefore, if something exists just for itself then it will have no meaning. Without meaning, what is the point of existing in the first place? Beautiful.
The more ways that something is perceived, the more meaning that 'thing' will have. By forming your own opinions of something, you are giving that 'thing' more depth and therefore giving it more reason to exist.


http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/26/26380/1.html
Translated Version

In many respects ground-breaking exhibition "Software"

An essential role played in this context, the exhibition "SOFTWARE. Information technology: its new meaning for art", the 1970 Jewish Museum in New York and in 1971 took place in the Smithsonian Institute. Was curator of the artist and writer Jack Burnham, participating artists have included Vito Acconi, David Antin, John Baldessari, the Giorno Poetry System, Hans Haacke, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Nam June Paik - but also scientists such as John Negroponte from MIT, Ted Nelson or the mathematician Jack Nolan.

SOFTWARE The exhibition can be viewed as an intersection at which the effort to explore the creative potential of information technology and forms of conceptual art went together. She was so important event in the still young history of art, which in the imagination of their protagonists and their sponsors in future of "software" and the "code" would be determined.

Visitors to the exhibition should be combined with various technical objects interact, without this necessarily to be regarded as works of art. The exhibition should be to enforce the cybernetic and systemic thinking contribute to the world as a transmission system consisting of many interconnected small interacting sub-systems presented.

Even now appeared as art information system, and players in the development of the modeling methods and approaches for the statistical description of cultural and social behavior on the visual level. Terms such as virtual networking, simulation, acceleration and compression of space and time promised a state where the language is circular, from truth probability, and the reality of construction.

Attracted attention and interest to be issued on this, because at the same time, the networking of humans and computers through user-friendly interface is one of the fundamental objectives of both the military and scientific research, such as the digital culture in general was. That was Jack Burnham's exhibition concept as part of the idea of a man-machine symbiosis, its first implementations in the form of computers and the first computer networks so far, however, mainly in the military field had taken place.

Also for the redefinition of the aesthetic consciousness, the future of cybernetic and system-theoretical models of Cognitive Science and self-organizing intelligent systems would be determined, the computer now seemed indispensable.

The exhibition was also avant-garde and a pioneer for something very common today: the close connection between art, corporate sponsorship, advertising and public relations.


Jack Burnham was the Curator of SOFTWARE.

"[The] cultural obsession with the art object is slowly disappearing and being replaced by what might be called 'systems consciousness.' Actually, this shifts from the direct shaping of matter to a concern for organizing quantities of energy and information...

"[It] is generally acknowledged by scientists working in the field of bio-electronics that there are no qualitative physical differences between living and nonliving matter; both groupings represent, simply, an ascending scale of complexity in the organization of matter. Therefore organisms artificially created may possess consciousness. Their level of subjectivity and intelligence depends upon their creator's ability to simulate or improvise upon biological principles...

http://www.volweb.cz/horvitz/burnham/homepage.html

I have never actually considered the lack of difference between living and nonliving matter before. Now that it has been brought to my attention, I am amazed and really interested by the concept.
If I compare myself to the cup that I am drinking out of, I find that we are actually rather similar.
We are both made out of 'matter' We may actually even contain some of the same matter.
Both the cup and I have reasons for being here. My reasons may be more complex but not necessarily more important. The cups reason for being here is to provide a vessel for me to drink out of. It is good as what it does and that is all that matters... I forgot my train of thought.