Edward A. Shanken (1998) 'The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art', in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10 (November) ; reprinted in Roy Ascott, ed., (1999) Reframing Consciousness: Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era. Exeter: Intellect. 'Software as a metaphor for art' was famously explored in Jack Burnham's 'software' show at the Jewish Museum in 1970 (Shanken 1998). The show can be seen as a product of its times with its structuralist and conceptualist concerns, and its aim to focus attention on the technical apparatus. It draws a parallel that has since become commonplace in looking to the dematerialisation of the conceptual arts tradition and the immaterialisation of information and communications technology. In his essay 'The House that Jack Built' (1998), Edward Shanken traces these concerns in the work of Burnham in his engagement with structuralism, art and technology to reveal its 'internal logic' (both in Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of Our Time, 1968, and the Structure of Art, 1971 written in parallel to curating the show - full title 'Software, Information Technology: Its Meaning for Art'). In other words, the show was an attempt to explain how software operates metaphorically in terms of concepts and ideas in distinction to the 'hardware' of the physical art object: 'an attempt to produce aesthetic sensations without the intervening "object"; in fact, to exacerbate the conflict or sense of aesthetic tension by placing works in mundane, non-art formats.' (Shaken quoting Burnham from private correspondence, 1998). In this way, software stands for what Burnham calls 'post-formalist art' that would include performance, interactive art and conceptual art in general, and the show operated as a testing ground for public interaction with 'information processing systems and their devices' (Shaken quoting Burnham's catalogue, 1998). By analogy, the internal logic of art is thus seen to consist of the abstract logic of a program in dialogue with or receiving feedback from human subjects. To Burnham, art is premised on a mythic structure that tries to separate it from everyday life: or the false distinction between art and non-art. Structuralism is evoked by Shanken in pointing to the influence of Claude LŽvi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Thomas Kuhn's critique of scientific objectivity, and Barthes's distinction between readerly and writerly texts in a number of the contributions to the show (for instance, Hans Haacke's 'Visitor's Profile' where personal information is entered into a system; Sonia Sheridan's 'Interactive Paper Systems' where visitors were encouraged to engage with the artist and a photocopy machine). Shanken describes the critical impulse in these terms: 'Technology in art, for Burnham, was meaningful only to the extent it contributed to stripping away signifiers to reveal the mythic nature of art.' (1998) Software, then, attempted to reveal some of the contradictions in art's organisational logic between art and non-art, between object and non-object, between artist and non-artist.