Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin (2002) 'Artistic Software for Dummies, and, by the way, Thoughts about the New World Order', in Goriunova & Shulgin, eds., Software Art: Thoughts, Read_me festival 1.2, catalogue, Moscow: Rosizo, State Centre for Museums and Exhibitions, pp. 6-9.


The Readme festival registers the emergence of software art as a phenomenon due to the overall spread of software, commercial proprietary as well as open source, to all spheres of human activity (Goriunova & Shulgin, 2002: 6). The title of their introductory text (in the accompanying catalogue to the 2002 first iteration in Moscow) is explicit in its reference to wider cultural and political issues beyond the stereotypes and false premises often associated with software production - 'Artistic Software for Dummies, and, by the way, Thoughts about the New World Order'. They reject the idea that software is somehow a transparent tool for creative endeavour and point to the subjectivity of the software producer and the power structures that determine this production. They further position this within larger ideological conflicts at a global level between the rationalised West and the metaphysical East that underpin the current world order. The current dominance of the rationalised and informational mode, places importance on art in as, what they call, 'the custodian of the non-rational' (2002: 8). They then make the statement that the 'Artist is not someone who creates images anymore; she rejects the idea of representation.' (2002: 8). The irony is that they are recommend the artistic deployment of rationalised algorithms to make non-rational software.