Programmed
The Whitney Museum of American Art‘s exhibition:
Programmed: Rules, Codes and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018, focused on works of art from the permanent collection that were based on artist‘s instructions.
The exhibition catalogue is likewise designed as a unique, programmed
catalogue which also follows instructions and uses data generated
by the visitors to the exhibit to determine the layout of each individual page.
Global data such as date, time and temperature were combined with userspecific data such as name and age, as well as responses to questions.
This data interacted with the elements on the page in predetermined ways
to create unique individualized and sometimes unexpected layouts.
Visitors to the exhibition could choose to print on demand between
10 to 42 folded pages on newsprint of their personally generated designs as
an instant catalogue. The paper and size were selected to reflect the immediacy and programmed nature of the catalogues. The final exhibition catalogue consists of a selection of these user-generated pages in response to each artwork in the exhibit. The catalogue is ever-evolving and could be generated to reflect whichever data selected; all visitors from a specific day, visitor‘s with the same favorite artwork or even the outdoor temperature. The catalogue functions then not only as an archive of the exhibit but also an archive of the experience of the creation of the user generated pages.