Code Profiles

Yesterday I went to the Chelsea Art Museum and I was happy to see Bradford Paley’s Code Profiles project. CodeProfiles was written in August 2002 and commissioned by Christiane Paul, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

“Code Profiles is a software that displays its underlying code and comments on itself. The code reads in its own source and displays it in a tiny font. As users move their finger over the touch screen, each line of the code becomes legible. The software moves three points in ‘code space’: the white line traces the code in the order it was written by the artist; the amber line traces the code word by word as someone might read it; the green line shows a sample of how the computer reads the code. The code lines themselves gradually get brighter as they execute more. In a self-reflexive way, Code Profiles unveils a ‘virtual object’ as the algorithms constructing this very object.”

The truly interesting feature of this project is that it’s displayed on a painting frame, and from distance it looks like a still image, until you get real close and move your finger over the touch screen that replaces the canvas.



I apologize for the image size but this was the most decent one I could find online.

Here’s a link to the project:

CodeProfiles

This page offers a CodeProfiles Remix by Martin Wattenberg:

CodeProfiles Remix