Code Art Exhibition Statement

Everything we see today on the display screen, from a painted landscape to a moving typography, is nothing but numbers translated into color, form, and movement. This journey from the analog world to the digital world has been one of the most profound metamorphoses in human history. Along this path, scientists discovered natural patterns and technologists turned those patterns into algorithms. Waves transformed into sets of numbers, and gradually the analog world was translated into the digital world; a translation in which things were reduced to zeros and ones. Images turned into pixels, and the realm of reality found its way into mathematics. But this translation did not remain one-way.

Marshall McLuhan says: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." In the history of technology, this statement perhaps applies nowhere more than to the relationship between humans and code. Code as a language became a context for the formation of a wide spectrum of meanings. Zeros and ones (Bool), these simplest possible elements, turned into logic and reasoning. Every number became a character and letter, characters and letters formed a string of speech (String), and ultimately a language for communication between human and computer emerged.

Now, with the simplification of coding language and technology becoming accessible, new arts have emerged. The artist who has grown up with digital tools since childhood now uses the language of those very tools for exploration and creation. Language and code as a tool have opened a new doorway to art, forming a new method for drawing, coloring, and illustrating. Now, reversing that process of analog-to-digital translation, numbers in various dimensions can be translated into colors and points, and in another realm, into sound and movement. It is as if algorithms are returning to patterns.

What you see in this exhibition are diverse visual works by Iranian and international artists—artists who have used the language of code to create their works: from the juxtaposition of ASCII characters and bitmap dots to the formation of images and the simulation of surrounding nature, from abstract patterns to organic patterns. In this way, code has transformed from a purely technical tool into a language for thinking and creation; a language that renders numbers as color, form, and movement.