Hot Software: Toward a Thermopolitics of Art and Technology

Software (1970) was one of the first exhibitions to bring together art and computers. In the decades following, this ambitious exhibition has been regarded largely through a lens of failure: It was beset with nonworking machines and conflict between exhibition organizers and artists, with blame placed on humans and their unsuccessful attempts at technological mastery. This essay presents a more expansive review by tracing the agency of the environment and issues of anthropogenic climate change in the technical and social breakdowns of the exhibition. Recent scholarship into other-than-human materialities helps lay the foundation for an understanding of the exhibition as a site of conflict between the immateriality of information and the active conditions of thermal media.