Museums are reassessing the role of computation in modern and contemporary art, mounting large-scale exhibitions that trace its origins, expand its canon, and situate digital practice within broader cultural histories. From early algorithmic experiments to immersive pre-internet environments and contemporary generative systems, these shows reveal how artists have long engaged technology not simply as a tool, but as a conceptual framework. They signal an institutional recognition that software, systems, and networks are central to understanding the visual culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Sep 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019
Curated by Christiane Paul with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro
Website

“Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences.”

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Feb 12–Jul 2, 2023
Curated by Leslie Jones
Website

“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 explores how the rise of computer technology, together with its emergence in popular consciousness, impacted the making of art in the age of the mainframe. International and interdisciplinary in scope, Coded examines the origins of what we now call digital art, featuring artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers working directly with computers as well as those using algorithms and other systems to produce their work. Whether computer-generated or not, the many artworks considered here reflect the simultaneous wonder and alienation that was characteristic of the 1960s and ’70s, along with the utopian and dystopian possibilities of these new machines. Today, with digital technology having been fully integrated into our lives, Coded’s examination of the years leading up to the advent of the personal computer is relevant, even imperative, to fully appreciating art and culture in the age of the computer—both then and now.”

Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Nov 24, 2024–Jul 13, 2025
Curated by Britt Salvesen and Staci Steinberger
Website

“Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. The nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers in Digital Witness illuminate today's visual culture where digital editing tools are easier to access than ever before.”

Electric Op

Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Sep 27, 2024–Jan 27, 2025
Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan
Website

“Bringing together more than ninety works spanning six decades, Electric Op examines how artists have used abstraction to explore the relationship between perception and technology. While today considered an art historical “dead end” with few echoes in contemporary art, Op art in fact became the first artistic movement of the Information Age, paving the way for art to be abstracted into analog and digital circuits. Just as optical illusions help us “see” ourselves in the act of seeing, Op art can help us see how vision itself has been transformed by electronic media.”

Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms

Toledo Museum of Art
Jul 12–Nov 30, 2025
Curated by Julia Kaganskiy
Website

“Artists have long used instructions and rule-based systems to produce their work, from thirteenth century Islamic geometric tiles to twentieth century avant-garde movements. Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms reveals how some contemporary artists use mathematical principles, chance, and automation to design and work with generative systems. In generative art, the artist creates a system to produce the artwork—perhaps written instructions for others to follow or a computer program. In the process they give up some control over the end result. The artist creates the rules, and the system generates the outcomes. This approach, whether analog or digital, enables the artist to experiment with multiple variations within a set of defined constraints, often yielding unexpected results.”

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991

Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
Feb 28–May 25, 2025
Curated by Michelle Cotton
Website

“Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 examines the pioneering role of women in digital art. Comprising more than one hundred works by fifty artists, the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts. Focusing on women who were among the first to use the computer – mainframe and minicomputers – as a tool for art making. They are accompanied by other artists who made the computer their subject or worked in a computational way with algorithmic or mathematically based systems. The exhibition begins with works made in academic or industrial computer labs and ends with others made on the first personal computers in the last years before the World Wide Web made the internet publicly accessible. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, it documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on female figures.”

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet

Tate Modern, London
Nov 28, 2024–Jun 1, 2025
Curated by Val Ravaglia
Website

“From the birth of op art to the dawn of the internet age, artists found new ways to engage the senses and play with our perception. Electric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works. This major exhibition brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Experience the psychedelic environments they created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorised components and new industrial processes. See how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.”