App Art

App Art is a type of art created in the form of digitally coded software apps, running on a range of mobile computer devices.

Unlike most traditional art shown in art galleries or museums, App Art often exists and integrate within physical and social environments, featuring interaction between the artwork and audience as active participants. App Art’s resulting cultural objects and experiences exist and move through digital networks, with artworks that are often iterative, evolving across time as software versions released by the artist.

App artworks increasingly move across physical and virtual spaces, mixing analog and digital physicality as part of the total experience of the artwork.  The background of artists creating work in the medium includes but is not limited to coding, painting, poetry, sculpture, music, theater, photography, dance, and drawing.  

Forms and presentation

A defining characteristic of App Art is the use of program code to construct the artwork.  Beyond core code, app artworks often use a mix of digital hardware, such as cameras, microphones, sensors, touch-sensitive screens, GPS, gyroscope that are most often embedded in an integrated digital device, most often in a mobile smartphone or tablet.  The resulting code can be controlled by customized physical gestures, sound input, direction, or geospatial location, and viewed in a variety of ways, including flat screens, as augmented reality, or virtual reality.  

App artworks are presented in a range of modalities, from one app running on one computer device, to arrays of networked apps working in tandem across the world, or integrated art installations mixing the app artwork with broader physical and digital elements. Most of these app artworks are created to work on devices running Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems, and can either run independently per device, or make use of centralized servers.   

Some types of App Art are decentralized, characterized by storing the app’s data and records of its operation on a blockchain, released in editions for scarcity, making use of cryptographic, non-fungible tokens.

History and context

App Art is rooted in a range of artistic traditions and movements, from Dada to Situationism, video art, internet art, conceptual art, Fluxus, net art, kinetic art, performance art, mail art, poetry, and happenings.

The advent of the iPhone in 2007 by Apple and the App Store in 2008 served as a critical juncture for the start of this new art form.  A surge of activity and interest followed, with artists creating artworks in the form of apps running on the revolutionary new device, featuring a touch sensitive screen and gestures that activated and operated apps on it.  

From 2011–2017, the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe presented the AppArtAward, an annual award for the best artistic developments in the field of applications for smartphones and tablets.  The description for the AppArtAward helps explain the early transition of older internet or net art into the App Art era. “Thanks to Apps, Smartphone owners are now able to carry their pockets a »portable Media Museum« of sorts with the most recent developments. This also allows for the migration of older artistic developments from one storage media or format to a new one: in other words, works previously presented on an interactive CD-ROM, or as museum installation can be programed as an App in order to keep pace with visitors' expanding and professionalizing media use.” [link to source]

Early artworks at the advent of App Art were often coded works by artists, originally conceived to run within a web browser, on a screen within an art exhibit, or translations of past work into the App Art medium.  For example, in 2011, Snibbe converted his Tripolar, an artwork commissioned by the Whitney in 2002, as part of its CODeDOC exhibition, into an iPhone-based app artwork.  [insert discussion of John Baldessari’s app, also rafael rozendaal]

ZKM’s text about the AppArtAward explains the progression of art and imagery, through to the time of app artworks, “The fact that the fine arts have become mobile with the aid of Apps is an entirely logical development. While painting in the age of cave paintings, or in fresco paintings during the Middle Ages was initially bound to one place, with the introduction of the panel painting – on wood or canvas – the picture became mobile: it could travel, the pictorial information could be shown to other people in different locations, and could be sold and stolen. What this meant was the production of one picture for various places. With the introduction of mechanical reproduction and mass media, a picture could also be duplicated, copied, and placed in new contexts. In other words, it became possible to produce many pictures for many places. The picture became a mass good. By means of Apps and mobile computing, not only is it possible to produce pictures at all locations for all locations, but the criteria for a direct connection between producer and consumer or user have also been met.” [link to source]

Exhibitions

The first known art exhibition of App Art was Poetic Codings, curated by Jody Zellen and shown at the Fellows of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, January 26 – March 29, 2013, as “an exhibition of iPad apps and projections”.  Featured artists included John Baldessari, Rafael Rozendaal, Scott Snibbe, and Jeremy Rotsztain.  

In an essay for the show, art historian Patrick Frank wrote about the lineage though to App Art, “Since the 1980s, a great deal of digital art has taken advantage of interactive technology. The present works are the most portable, and in many cases the most elegant of works in this vein yet created. Duchamp said that no art work is complete without a viewer; the interactive works in this exhibition take that statement to its logical conclusion, because viewer input is not merely desirable but required.” [link to source]

Frank also noted the lack of definition and support for apps as artworks by Apple, “…the App Store does not quite seem to know what to make of these creations. The artists choose the general store heading under which to offer their apps, but the headings that Apple offers are almost comically wayward: Some of them are filed under Entertainment, some are called Lifestyle (whatever that means), some are Photo and Video apps, two are filed under Music, and one is even Educational. How about this: Let's be revolutionary and just call them art.” [link to source]

Activism

In the fall of 2015, during an opening at Postmasters gallery in New York City, gallerist Paulina Bebecak encouraged artists Seth Indigo Carnes and Serkan Ozkaya to discuss their shared complaint about Apple’s lack of an Art category in the App Store for their app artworks.  This discussion led them to create +ArtApp, an art collective dedicated to research, incubate and support the nascent App Art movement and arts-centered apps worldwide. As part of this effort, the collective creative a petition requesting Apple to create an Art category on the App Store for app artworks and arts-centered apps. 

The petition gathered over 13,000 signatures worldwide, with prominent supporters including Christiane Paul, Scott Snibbe, Kevin McCoy, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), and Mark Tribe, along with endorsements from The Andy Warhol Museum, NEW INC, Artsy, Phillips Auction House, Eyebeam, ZKM, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Postmasters, Bitforms, and many other organizations. While the art community was galvanized, the petition had no effect on Apple. 

Public Presentations and Panel Discussions

During Creative Tech Week in May 2016, +ArtApp organized a panel discussion titled App Art : a new medium, focusing on “a new medium of art in the form of software apps created and distributed by artists across mobile device platforms”. Panelists included Seth Carnes (Artist, creator of Poetics app) Paulina Bebecka (Director, Postmasters Gallery) Roddy Schrock (Director, Eyebeam) Megan Newcome (Digital Art Auctions, Phillips), and Joshue Ott (Artist, creator of Thicket and Variant apps) [link to source]

In May and June of 2016, the +ArtApp collective presented ArtAppHQ, a month-long temporary autonomous zone for art and technology at The Clemente in the Lower East Side in New York City. During ArtAppHQ, various apps were displayed and discussed, culminating in a panel discussion titled Creating Apps / Creating Art, featuring Seth Indigo Carnes, Paulina Bebecka, Serkan Ozkaya, Malcolm Levy, Joshua Ott, and Kenneth Kirschner. [link to source]